post-truth 2

new 919

see alt fact post truth main

neglected

trump lie count 9K 4/19? 10k 619?

this node apparently refers to the term itself

Lies, damn lies and :{post-truth:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Lee McIntyre, Boston University

Any amateur politician can engage in lying. President Donald Trump is going further than that. He's engaging in 'post-truth'.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trumps-lies-and-deception-are-catching-up-to-all-of-us-as-the-stock-market-posts-worst-point-drop-ever-on-record/

no lnx

Trump’s lies and deception are catching up to all of us as the stock market posts ‘worst point drop ever on record’

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, listens as Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar speaks to members of the press Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020, in the James S. brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 27, 2020

In a muddled, dishonest, rambling news conference from the White House press briefing room, President Donald Trump for over an hour talked to reporters Wednesday evening about coronavirus in an attempt to stave off three days of market near-collapse. He lied. He twisted the truth. He displayed little grasp of basic facts. He didn’t let the experts run the show.

He instilled no confidence Wednesday night. In fact, the DOW futures dropped as Trump began speaking:

Dow Futures dropped when Trump said the market fell 2k points because of the Dem debate pic.twitter.com/cvbviB2l9a

— Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) February 27, 2020

The markets on Thursday rewarded his efforts with the DOW posting the largest single-day loss in history.

BREAKING: Dow Jones Industrial Average records worst point drop ever on record, plummeting nearly 1,200 points https://t.co/T8yrpR8LHE pic.twitter.com/EaOeKgC34O

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) February 27, 2020

Why?

The Trump administration has known about coronavirus since at least December 1, 2019. It did nothing until January 29, when the White House posted a memo announcing President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force. The task force did not even include the surgeon general, making it clear the White House had little interest in communicating to the American people any sense of competence or delivering even an iota of public education.

Nearly an entire month went by. Trump and the First Family played in India, posing at the Taj Mahal, refusing to eat the specially prepared foods their hosts created just for them, and praising Prime Minister Modi as Muslims were being slayed just streets away from where the Trump family was staying.

The grandeur and beauty of the Taj Mahal is awe inspiring! ???? ???? pic.twitter.com/jcYwXHxf4c

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) February 24, 2020

“The losses mark the worse week for U.S. stocks since the financial crash of 2008. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq each also plunged by more than 4%,” reports ABC News, calling it the “worst week” since the 2008 global financial crisis.

This, as the First Family played, pretending to be on official business as the coronavirus outbreak exploded earlier this week.

Trump returned after two days of about 1000 point drops in the DOW each day. He hastily called a press conference for Wednesday at 6 PM. Just after it began at 6:30 PM it became clear there was not going to be a coronavirus czar, there was no real plan, other than to put in charge Vice President Mike Pence. Even a Fox News pundit eschewed that decision, noting Pence doesn’t believe in science, is not a doctor, and has a horrific record when it comes to public health – he oversaw an explosive HIV outbreak during which he decided to pray for guidance rather than listen to what experts told him he had to do.

And now, as the markets tumble, as Trump lies about the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. and pretends that there might not be “community spread” – the first case of which the CDC literally announced just after Trump’s news conference, it’s become even more clear Trump and his administration aren’t interested in protecting the American public, but rather, they are interested in appearing to be doing “things” that might make it appear they are protecting the American public – when their goal is to protect the markets.

That’s why Vice President Pence’s first act as head of the Coronavirus Task Force was to add top and Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to the Task Force, along with the surgeon general (finally).

Absent from the list: any public health experts, any crisis experts, anyone not from the Trump administration, the CDC, or the NIH. In other words, there is no one on the Trump Coronavirus Task Force the Trump administration cannot control.

That’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because the administration has already told the federal government all communication, to reporters and others, is to go through Vice President Pence, and it’s dangerous because there is no one who will tell Trump or Pence anything they don’t want to hear.

And what else is the Trump administration doing?

Campaigning at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Over the course of Thursday through Sunday, 21 top Trump administration officials, including the President and the Vice President, and a large number of Cabinet Secretaries, will all be attending and speaking at the far right-wing conference. CPAC over the years has hosted some of the most extreme groups and fringe elements in conservative America. Groups like the John Birch Society, and extremists like Milo Yiannopoulos — whose invitation was pulled when a vile video of him was released.

The Democratic primaries are just getting started but the markets have already voted. They have made clear they have no confidence in this President and this Vice President.

Unfortunately, those who will pay the price form that vote are, as usual, the Americans who can least afford a hit to their life savings – if they have any – or to their 401(k)s, or to the number of hours they work which will be cut so their bosses can save a few bucks when business gets bad.

The stock market has now plunged about 3200 points this week, and there’s no reason to suggest Friday will be any better, because there’s no reason to suggest this president will be any better.

Top Trump economic advisor slammed for claiming coronavirus ‘contained’ after CDC warns of spread

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 26, 2020

Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s top economic advisor, is falsely claiming the U.S. has “contained” the coronavirus, literally minutes after reports broke that the CDC is warning of a spread of the deadly virus that has killed 2600 people, mostly in China.

jANUARY 29, 2020

The Reality Game

Samuel Woolley discussed the origins of online disinformation and laid out a plan to combat it in the future.

oxford inst computational copycats

ethnographer

https://www.c-span.org/video/?468349-1/the-reality-game

...I WOULD LIKE TO WELCOME YOU ALL, WE ARE THRILLED TO HAVE SAMUEL WOOLLEY WITH US HERE TONIGHT. CELEBRATING A VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOK CALLED "THE REALITY GAME". HOW THE NEXT WAVE OF TECHNOLOGY WILL BREAK THE TRUTH. IT'S FROM OUR FRIENDS AT PUBLIC AFFAIRS BOOKS, DOCTOR WOOLLEY IS A WRITER AND RESEARCHER SPECIALIZING IN THE STUDY OF A.I., EMERGENT TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS, PERSUASION AND SOCIAL MEDIA. HE'S AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR PROPAGANDA RESEARCH AT THE CENTER FOR MEDIA ENGAGEMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN. PROFESSOR WALLY FOUNDED AND DIRECTED THE DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE LAB AT THE INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE WHICH IS A 50-YEAR-OLD THINK TANK BASED IN THE HEART OF SILICON VALLEY. ALSO COFOUNDED AND DIRECTED RESEARCH TEAM AT THE COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA PRODUCT AT OXFORD INTERNET INSTITUTE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXNARD. HE'S WRITTEN ON POLITICAL MANIPULATIONS TECHNOLOGY FOR A VARIETY OF PUBLICATIONS INCLUDING WIRED, THE

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/reporter-disgraced-by-ukraine-scandal-gets-scathing-review-from-his-former-outlet-but-key-details-are-missing-from-the-story/

no lnx

Reporter disgraced by Ukraine scandal gets scathing review from his former outlet — but key details are missing from the story

Written by Cody Fenwick February 19, 2020

President Donald Trump’s sprawling Ukraine scandal consumed Washington politics for months and led to the third Senate impeachment trial of a president in U.S. history. Among the casualties in the uproar was the reputation of John Solomon, a writer for The Hill and personality on its online streaming channel, who was directly implicated in spreading misinformation at the heart of the scandal.

A new piece published by The Hill on Wednesday heavily scrutinized Solomon’s work for the outlet, pointing out conflicts of interest, errors in judgment, and failures on his part and that of the editorial process. But there are key questions that remain unanswered about Solomon’s role at The Hill, questions that demand more scrutiny for the outlet itself as it enabled the disgraced reporter.

Solomon and the Biden story

Solomon, who no longer works for The Hill but contributes to Fox News, received a scathing review in the new piece. In particular, his writing about former Vice President Joe Biden’s connections to Ukraine demonstrate significant failures on journalistic ethics.

His writing played a major role in supporting the false narrative that Biden had corruptly involved himself as vice president in Ukrainian politics to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who was working for the energy company Burisma in the country. As is now well known, Biden, with the backing of President Barack Obama’s administration, intervened in Ukraine in 2016 to oust Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Solomon’s columns, The Hill noted, supported the widely debunked notion that Biden was attempting to protect his son by undermining Shokin’s efforts to investigate Burisma. This allegation formed the basis of Trump’s demand over the course of many months in 2019 that Ukraine investigate Biden, his potential 2020 rival. The House of Representatives later determined this action to be a corrupt abuse of power, an illegitimate interference in the upcoming election, and an attempt to solicit a bribe.

But the claim remains unsupported and is contradicted by known facts, and Solomon’s basis for pushing the allegations appears highly dubious. Shokin, who was widely viewed as corrupt, was one of the people Solomon interviewed for his research, The Hill reported, even though his “reliability as a source is in question.”

“In certain columns, Solomon failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation,” the piece noted.

And Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who acted as his point person in the Ukraine matter, said he was a key source for Solomon’s reporting as well, though Solomon denies it. Solomon did, however, work with Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who has since been indicted on charges of conspiracy and campaign finance law violations. The Hill said the extent and nature of Solomon’s work with Parnas “remain unclear but potentially troubling.” Parnas has turned over evidence that indicates extensive involvement with Solomon, Giuliani, and others.

Solomon also quoted or referred to lawyers Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, who represent clients with interests in Ukraine and some of the figures in the broader scandal. But Solomon did not disclose when referencing the pair that they also represented him legally. And The Hill noted that Solomon shared a draft of one of his columns with Parnas, diGenova and Toensing, in violation of the outlet’s editorial policy.

Was The Hill concerned about Solomon before his role in the Ukraine scandal was revealed?

In response to these and other serious problems in Solomon’s work, The Hill announced it will devote itself to implementing eight lessons learned from the episode. It also has added editor’s notes to Solomon’s columns to add more context or disclosures “that should have been highlighted at the time of his writings.” While this kind of public admission of failure and commitment to accountability is welcome and appropriate, there are some gaps in the outlet’s account.

Most notably, one event recounted in the piece remains underexplained: “Solomon also wrote numerous news articles for The Hill in 2017 and 2018. An editorial decision was made to label Solomon’s work as opinion as of May 14, 2018.”

For close followers of political journalism, this fact was always notable about Solomon’s work. Though The Hill typically has a sharp delineation between opinion pieces and news pieces, Solomon’s writing clearly blurred the line. For example, one headline read: “Ukrainian Embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016.” This sounds like it would be a normal news story at The Hill, but it was nevertheless labeled as an opinion piece.

The Hill acknowledged this problem:

While Solomon’s columns on Ukraine were labeled as opinion, they largely read like news stories.Adding to the potential confusion between opinion and news, Solomon was identified as “an award-winning journalist” in his column tagline. When appearing on television to discuss his Ukraine columns, Solomon was not typically labeled an opinion writer by the broadcast programs. The Hill did not contact television producers to label Solomon as an opinion columnist. It should have.

Lending further support to an impression that the columns were more like news stories, rather than opinion columns, Solomon’s Ukraine columns were longer than typical opinion pieces, in many cases contained what could be viewed or was identified by him as original reporting, and stuck to one general topic. This may have suggested to many readers it was an investigative series, which normally resides in the news department, rather than opinion. Solomon’s subsequent appearances on Fox News where he was often identified as an investigative journalist further potentially blurred the distinction between news and opinion in the minds of some readers.

Every news outlet is free to set its own standards, and the delicate balance between news, analysis, and opinion can be handled in a variety of ways. But The Hill acknowledged that Solomon’s work violated the standards it tried to set for itself, with the effect of potentially confusing readers.

But most critical is that The Hill changed the way it described Solomon’s columns’ in 2018. While once they were considered news, they were afterward considered opinion. What changed? No explanation is given.

The change is critical because it points to The Hill’s responsibility for Solomon’s work. Were his editors suddenly concerned about the nature of his work? Did they feel he was less credible than he had been before? Did they believe his previous credibility had been overrated? Importantly, pieces by opinion contributors such as Solomon in The Hill bear the tagline: “The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.”

If there were concerns about Solomon’s reliability and the accuracy of the reporting, they were certainly warranted. As the review and subsequent events have shown, Solomon’s claims and reporting in his columns were highly dubious and in violation of journalistic standards.

But if this was the reason for designating his columns as opinion rather than news, the switch was wholly insufficient. As the review published Wednesday noted, “opinion” pieces aren’t free from the standards of journalism; they are “vetted for accuracy, conflicts of interest, and other relevant factors; when statements of fact are found to be incorrect, or conflicts of interest are found to have been undisclosed or overlooked, The Hill routinely corrects those or adds clarifications to columns.”

The worry, then, is that The Hill had reason to suspect Solomon’s reporting was dodgy, but it kept printing his columns anyway. Why would it have done this? One possible reason: Solomon’s pieces were quite popular and gained traction in right-wing circles. As the review noted:

Starting in March 2019, Solomon wrote a series of columns on Ukraine, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, as well as U.S. diplomats in Ukraine. Solomon discussed his columns on television, most notably on Sean Hannity‘s opinion show on Fox News. These appearances amplified the reach of Solomon’s work at The Hill.

The publication of Solomon’s columns was enormously consequential. It helped further a negative narrative about Biden that is, by all appearances, entirely baseless, which could have impacted his standing in the 2020 primary election. It may have even helped lead to the impeachment of Trump.

It’s worth asking, then, what The Hill’s editors knew about Solomon’s work and when they knew it.

AlterNet reached out to The Hill with questions about Solomon’s role and why his pieces were designated as opinion. This story will be updated with any response.

CNN anchor corners Trump trade advisor as he rattles off several lies about the economy

President Donald Trump’s Trade Advisor Peter Navarro had to take…

*****

This will disappear down the memory hole in short order….

“A White House memo justifying the U.S. strike that killed Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January makes no mention of an imminent threat, which was President Trump’s rationale for the attack.

*****

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/conservative-writer-details-how-evidence-cant-penetrate-the-delusional-trumpian-bubble/

no lnx

Conservative writer details how evidence can’t penetrate the delusional ‘Trumpian bubble’

Written by Alex Henderson February 12, 2020

Although President Donald Trump has never had really high approval ratings, those who support him are not generally lukewarm toward the president; they are intensely devoted. Conservative Never Trump journalist Charlie Sykes examines the intense devotion of Trump’s MAGA base in a February 11 article for The Bulwark, citing two e-mails he read as examples of how difficult it is to sway anyone who lives in the “Trumpian bubble.”

New revelations of Trump “fleecing of taxpayers by charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates,” Sykes laments, won’t matter to MAGA voters “just like the evidence about Trump’s meddling in Ukraine didn’t matter, or last week’s dual meltdowns at the Prayer Breakfast and in the East Room didn’t matter. You think the new budget and deficit numbers will move the needle? Or the fallout from the trade war? Or the 15,000-plus false statements he’s made since taking office? The probability of any of this mattering to Trump’s base ranges from ‘impossible’ to ‘no effing way.’”

Trump, Sykes explains, benefits from an “alternative-reality bubble that has effectively isolated many of his supporters from inconvenient information.” And Sykes goes on to explain why “two e-mails I received this week highlight the challenges of breaking through the Trumpian bubble.”

The first e-mail, according to Sykes, came from a Bulwark reader in New Berlin, Wisconsin. The reader asserted that when talking to Trump devotees in his area, it was evident how much they cut themselves off from any anti-Trump information.

The reader told Sykes that during a recent conversation with them, “It was difficult to challenge their points or even have any informed discussions with them, because whatever I mentioned, they had no knowledge of it occurring. Very much short on facts. Had all of the repeated Trumpisms — witch hunt, hoax, etc. — down pat. But if you try to drill down a little deeper, you couldn’t hit home.”

After Sykes included that e-mail in his newsletter, he notes, another Bulwark reader — a woman in Seattle — saw it and reported having very similar experiences with Trump voters. She wrote,“Facebook has created an impermeable barrier so that people are NOT seeing anything that is different from what their tribe wants to believe. The worst part about it is that people think they are getting the news instantly — they have the illusion that they are instantly aware of what is going on, but the reality is a highly deceptive, manipulated, and curated dribble of propaganda.”

That reader specifically discussed someone Sykes describes as “Roger” (not the person’s real name). “Roger,” the reader lamented, “thinks Trump has saved the taxpayers money.”

Sykes concludes his article on a depressing note, writing, “And now, we all live in Roger’s world.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/white-house-targeting-of-truth-tellers-is-turning-the-intelligence-community-into-a-crowd-of-cowards/

revenge witch hunt authoritarian // wm barr mueller probe collusion

truthful hyperbole?

trump kids lied about how many apts sold? am olog bk? [djt boasts about getting cases quashed?]

an 220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bombshell-report-finds-iraqi-officials-doubt-trumps-basis-for-escalating-to-the-brink-of-war/

no lnx

‘Bombshell’ report finds Iraqi officials doubt Trump’s basis for escalating to the brink of war

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, senior White House advisors and senior military personnel, delivers remarks during a national televised address Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020, from the Cross Hall of the White House, responding to the retaliatory missile strikes against U.S. military and coalition forces in Iraq on Tuesday by the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams February 7, 2020

In a “bombshell” revelation that calls into question one of the Trump administration’s stated justifications for assassinating Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani—a move that nearly sparked a region-wide military conflict—Iraqi intelligence officials told the New York Times that they believe ISIS, not an Iran-linked militia, was likely responsible for the Dec. 27 rocket attack that killed an American contractor at an airbase near Kirkuk, Iraq.

The Times reported Thursday that “Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets… saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack” was responsible.

“All the indications are that it was Daesh,” Brigadier General Ahmed Adnan, the Iraqi chief of intelligence for the federal police at the K-1 air base, told the Times, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. “We know Daesh’s movements.”

The Trump administration has not released a single piece of evidence showing that the Iraqi militia Khataib Hezbollah, which has ties to Iran, was responsible for the attack on K-1. The group has denied carrying out the attack.

The U.S. responded to the rocket attack days later with deadly airstrikes on Khataib Hezbollah targets in Iraq and Syria, setting off a dangerous escalatory spiral that brought Iran and the U.S. to the brink of war.

On Jan. 2, the U.S. assassinated Soleimani with a drone strike in Baghdad ordered by President Donald Trump. Following the assassination, which was widely condemned as an act of war, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a statement claiming without evidence that Soleimani “orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months—including the attack on December 27th—culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel.”

But Iraqi officials told the Times that “based on circumstantial evidence and long experience in the area where the attack took place,” there is good reason to be skeptical about U.S. claims that Khataib Hezbollah was behind it.

As the Times reported:

The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.

Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.

The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces…

These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.

“We as Iraqi forces cannot even come to this area unless we have a large force because it is not secure,” Brig. Gen. Adnan said of the area from which the rocket attack was launched. “How could it be that someone who doesn’t know the area could come here and find that firing position and launch an attack?”

In response to the Times report, Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, tweeted: “Al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and we went to war with Iraq. If this report is true, ISIS attacked the U.S. and we nearly went to war with Iran.”

Sina Toossi

@SinaToossi

This is huge: Iraqi military & intelligence officials say it’s highly unlikely that a rocket attack that killed an Iraqi-American contractor in early January—& led to an escalation cycle that almost started a war—was carried out by an Iran-allied militia.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/world/middleeast/iraq-iran-hezbollah-evidence.html …

Iraqi soldiers at the K-1 base, which was struck by rockets on Dec. 27.

Was U.S. Wrong About Attack That Nearly Started a War With Iran?

Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started a dangerous spiral of events.

nytimes.com

184

3:57 PM - Feb 6, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

119 people are talking about this

CODEPINK

@codepink

The US almost started WWIII based on questionable evidence.

After all of the violence in the Middle East following the attack on US bases, #Iraqi officials are now questioning the US's claim that the #Iran-backed militia Khataib Hezbollah are to blame. https://buff.ly/31CpWqT

Iraqi soldiers at the K-1 base, which was struck by rockets on Dec. 27.

Was U.S. Wrong About Attack That Nearly Started a War With Iran?

Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started a dangerous spiral of events.

nytimes.com

1:15 PM - Feb 6, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

44 people are talking about this

U.S. officials insisted to the Times that they have “solid evidence” showing that Khataib Hezbollah carried out the attack, but they have not released any of this evidence to the public or to Iraqi officials.

“We have requested the American side to share with us any information, any evidence, but they have not sent us any information,” Lt. Gen. Muhammad al-Bayati, chief of staff for former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, told the Times.

Ilan Goldenberg, Middle East security director at the Center for a New American Security think tank, tweeted that the U.S. Congress “must ask questions about this and get the intel.”

Responsible Statecraft managing editor Benjamin Armbruster agreed.

“Congress needs to investigate ASAP,” Armbruster tweeted.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/why-the-alternative-universe-of-trump-loyalists-wont-be-broken-by-the-bolton-bombshell/

no lnx

Why the ‘alternative universe’ of Trump loyalists won’t be broken by the Bolton bombshell

Written by Alex Henderson January 28, 2020

When President Richard Nixon announced his resignation on August 8, 1974, he was being inundated with Watergate headlines and realized that many right-wing Republicans in the U.S. Senate would join Democrats in voting to remove him from office; Nixon, in other words, quit because he knew he would inevitably be fired.

But President Donald Trump, in contrast to Nixon, has been able to count on fiercely loyal Republicans no matter how scandal-ridden he becomes. Republicans, during Trump’s impeachment, have adamantly rallied around the president — and journalist Susan B. Glasser, in a January 28 article for The New Yorker, argued that even John Bolton’s bombshell allegations aren’t swaying diehard Trumpistas.

Bolton, former national security adviser in the Trump Administration, alleges in his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” that Trump tied military aid to Ukraine to an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, according to multiple reports. Trump and his cult-like defenders have maintained there was no such “quid pro quo” — that investigating the Bidens was never a condition of military aid. But in a leaked manuscript of Bolton’s book, the New York Times reported over the weekend, Bolton alleges Trump and his allies made it clear to the Ukrainian government that there would be no military aid without an investigation of the Bidens.

Trump loyalists, Glasser notes, have been quick to defame Bolton.

“The attack on Bolton was swift and predictable: Bolton was a disgruntled former employee, a neocon, a money-grubber with a two-million-dollar book to sell,” Glasser explains. “The president himself led the mob, beginning to tweet and retweet anti-Bolton statements.”

The Republican National Committee (RNC), Glasser observes, has been “sending out official talking points attacking Bolton.” And many Senate Republicans, she writes, are still opposed to featuring Bolton or any other witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial — no matter how damning Bolton’s allegations are.

“At any other moment in Washington in my lifetime, I would have predicted with absolute confidence that the Bolton revelation would force Republican senators to switch their position and support witnesses — and not just a few, but almost all of them,” Glasser asserts. “But this is now, and the unthinkable and inconceivable have become increasingly routine. Here it was: the proverbial smoking gun, right in the middle of the trial — crucial evidence that Trump, his advisers, his lawyers and his enablers on Capitol Hill knew about and were trying to suppress.”

Glasser concludes her New Yorker piece on a somber note, lamenting the fact that no matter what Bolton has to say about Ukraine, Trump’s loyalists and sycophants aren’t budging an inch.

“Monday proved once again that this alternative universe has become the new normal in Trump’s GOP,” Glasser writes. “It is not the exception but the rule. The post-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party will be largely the same as the pre-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party.”

ironical hubby of miss alt facts ;)

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/will-republicans-stand-for-gaslighting-or-reality-george-conway-highlights-moment-of-reckoning-for-senate-gop/

no lnx

Will Republicans ‘stand for gaslighting or reality?’: George Conway highlights ‘moment of reckoning’ for Senate GOP

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story January 26, 2020

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” conservative attorney George Conway launched a broadside against Republican senators for their conduct in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, saying they are selling lies to the public.

Speaking with host Jake Tapper, Conway — the husband of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway — painted a withering portrait of the GOP that is hellbent on acquitting the president of obvious impeachable crimes.

“I’m deeply saddened,” Conway began. “It is very upsetting and this is a moment of reckoning not just for the country and the rule of law and the constitution, but it is a specific day of reckoning for the Republican senators who took this oath, and the Republican Party generally, are they going to stand for lies instead of truth?”

“Are they going to stand for gaslighting instead of reality? Are they going to just do the bidding of this one man and put his interests over those of the country? That is what this is about,” he added

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/you-cannot-expect-anything-but-fascism-pedagogy-theorist-explains-how-trump-legitimated-a-culture-of-lying-cruelty-and-a-collapse-of-social-responsibility/

National Archives Blurred Out Anti-Trump Messages In Women's March Photo

An official told The Washington Post it was only a "promotional display." Critics said that didn't make the changes OK.

Mary Papenfuss

120 huffpo

1/20 new

Australia is struggling to cope with deadly infernos and faces losing nearly a billion animals in the terrible bushfires — but in the midst of those tragedies, authorities are also battling hoaxes and misinformation, including false reports of widespread arson. Many of the claims seek to suggest that arson, not climate change, was a key driver of the historic fires.

The hashtag #ArsonEmergency began trending shortly after the new year. Queensland University of Technology researcher Timothy Graham says heidentified troll and bot social media accounts that tried to shift the narrative about the fires as being the work of dozens of criminals.

"We studied about 300 Twitter accounts driving the #ArsonEmergency hashtag to identify inauthentic behavior," Graham said Friday in an essay for The Conversation, which he co-wrote with fellow researcher Tobias Keller.

"We found many accounts using #ArsonEmergency were behaving 'suspiciously,' compared to those using #AustraliaFire and #BushfireAustralia," they said. "Accounts peddling #ArsonEmergency carried out activity similar to what we've witnessed in past disinformation campaigns, such as the coordinated behavior of Russian trolls during the 2016 US presidential election."

As for who mounted the social media campaign to push the arson narrative, Graham and Keller say that while software tools allowed them to identify bots and trolls, they weren't able to trace the bogus accounts to any specific people or entities.

While arson has historically been one of the causes of Australian wildfires, the country is facing an unprecedented bushfire disaster. Since September, fires have now consumed an area larger than the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined. And a new "megafire" was created Friday when two blazes joined — covering nearly 1.5 million acres, as NPR's Scott Neuman reports.

The #ArsonEmergency campaign seems to have peaked around Tuesday, when thousands of tweets used the hashtag, Graham and Keller say.

Around the same time the bot campaign hit its crescendo, news stories about the wildfires also touted a police report in hard-hit New South Wales, where authorities recently announced that they have taken legal action against more than 180 people for fire-related offenses. But only a small fraction of those people face charges that might be construed as arson, and the figure also spans a period that began in late 2019.

The NSW police said that while 24 people were charged with deliberately lighting bushfires, 53 faced legal actions — which include a warning — for not complying with a statewide ban on fires. And the overall number also includes 47 people who were accused of not properly disposing of lit cigarettes or matches.

Conservatives in the U.S. also picked up on the arson thread, with President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeting a post about the arrests in New South Wales.

On Friday, an employee of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in Australia raised concerns about the company's coverage of the wildfires, accusing the publisher of newspapers such as The Australian and the Herald Sun of carrying out an irresponsible "misinformation campaign."Documenting a further convolution in the narrative, Australia's ABC reports, "Some of the misinformation includes the idea left-wing 'ecoterrorists' are behind some fires."

"I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies," Emily Townsend, a commercial finance manager at News Corp, wrote in an all-staff email. She added that the newspapers' angles of coverage were "not only irresponsible, but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet."...

more that 300 days since the White House held a formal briefing with reporters. Here’s why this former press secretary is against its resurrection

Melanie McFarland / SalonJanuary 12, 2020

In so-called normal times and under business-as-usual administrations the job of White House Press Secretary doesn’t lead to renown or infamy. Those terms — normal, business as usual — don’t…

Trump called out for ‘Orwellian lie’ after saying he ‘saved pre-existing conditions’ — while trying to kill ObamaCare David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement120 an

note not all artls on QS assass shift rationale/lies included here

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/the-evolution-of-a-trump-lie-how-we-got-from-imminent-attack-to-four-embassies-in-9-fact-free-steps/

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The evolution of a Trump lie: How we got from ‘imminent attack’ to ‘four embassies’ in 9 fact-free steps

Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos January 12, 2020

Sometimes deception generates a “tangled web,” other times just a hilarious mess. But Donald Trump’s war-triggering assassination and post-drone strike rationalizations show two things: one is how clumsily Trump shifts his lies from day to day, the other is how Mike Pompeo and Fox News hurry along in Trump’s wake, trying to paper over irrational statements with a thin veneer of claims that all fall apart on even the most cursory examination.

This isn’t even how a little lie spawned a big one. This lie started big and it stayed that way. The only thing that really grew was how obviously Pompeo and others were willing to throw away any pretense of integrity to make it seem that Trump had a passing grasp on the facts. By week’s end, America got to see how Pompeo’s I-can’t-help-smirking-when-I-lie grin had grown larger than the Joker’s.

1) Donald Trump was not supposed to assassinate Qassem Soleimani. Military planners presented it to Trump as the “far out” option under the silly assumption he would take a more reasoned approach.

2) What those planners weren’t considering wasn’t just Trump’s disdain for reason, but his need to make a big gesture toward Iran to secure the support of Republican senators in his upcoming impeachment trial.

3) So the mission went forward, with a pretense of “improving safety,” even though killing the Iranian general made the situation across the whole Middle East immediately, and obviously less secure.

4) After initially stating that Soleimani was calling back to Tehran for authorization on a plan that threatened hundreds of Americans, Mike Pompeo continually shifted the target and tried to confuse “imminent attack” with retribution for things that were already past.

5) When Congress finally got a chance to be briefed on the so-called intelligence behind the attack, even Republicans were shocked at the inability of the White House to produce anything to support their actions in the “worst briefing ever”.

6) Then, days after the attack and stinging from complaints by Republicans in House and Senate, Trump dropped [as in animal droppings] the idea thatSoleimani had been plotting “to blow up the U.S. embassy” into an interview, while providing absolutely no evidence.

7) With that new claim on the board, Pompeo hurried to not only try to support Trump’s claim by giving a long list of possible targets, including “embassies,” but flat-out lied by saying Congress had been told about the embassy threat in the briefing — which was quickly contradicted by those in attendance.

8) Trump expanded on his freshly-generated claim at his rally, telling those in attendance that “Soleimani was … looking very seriously at our embassies, and not just the embassy in Baghdad,” forcing Pompeo to ramp up his lies to match Trump’s latest claims.

9) Trump reaches into his bag of nonsense to come up with the idea that specifically four embassies were under threat by Soleimani.

Your move, Pompeo. And it goes without saying that, at every step along the line, Fox News has been not just cheering on Trump’s latest claim, but out in front, making suggestions that Trump is underplaying the real threat and that only more attacks can bring peace.

post-truth? correction irrelevent?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-ordered-doj-investigation-into-hillary-clinton-goes-out-with-a-whimper-now-what

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Trump-ordered DOJ investigation into Hillary Clinton goes out with a whimper. Now what?

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement January 12, 2020

It was October 9, 2016. Candidate Donald Trump at the second presidential debate promised – and threatened – Hillary Clinton that if he became president she would go to prison.

“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” a grinning Secretary Clinton on stage told the audience.

“Because you’d be in jail,” a grimacing Trump gloated.

It was such a stunning moment, a gut punch to American democracy and presidential politics. We don’t investigate our political opponents and presidents don’t promise – or threaten – to lock them up.

It was cheered by the far right, and to this day extremists celebrate the anniversary of those horrific words.

Students For Trump

@TrumpStudents

3 years ago today, President @realDonaldTrump had one of the greatest debate moments of all time...

When Hillary Clinton said it was a good thing he wasn't in charge of the justice system,

To which President Trump responded, "Because you'd be in jail."

Priceless. ??

Embedded video

One month later to the day, in the wee hours of the morning, the news networks would call the election for Trump, despite Clinton winning the popular election by nearly three million more votes.

Less than one year in to office, President Donald Trump used the power of social media to lie repeatedly about his former political opponent, and forced his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to open an investigation into Clinton.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn't looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems..

78.8K

2:57 AM - Nov 3, 2017

Twitter Ads info and privacy

42.5K people are talking about this

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Many people in our Country are askingwhat the “Justice” Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and “acid washed”33,000 Emails? No justice!

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There were no grounds. She had been investigated before by the FBI and cleared. She had been investigated before by Congress multiple times and cleared. She had sat before Congress for 11 hours in a sham Benghazi hearing (one of many sham Benghazi investigations by Republicans on Capitol Hill), and even the top Republican announced at the end of that grueling day – during which Clinton performed, some said brilliantly – that they had learned nothing new.

Sessions’ investigation cast a big net, as The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Attorney General Sessions directed John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, in November of 2017 to, as the Post details, review “a wide array of issues related to Clinton. They included the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One matters, along with the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and alleged leaks by former FBI director James B. Comey.”

“Your recommendations should include whether any matters not currently under investigation warrants the opening of an investigation, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources or further investigation, and whether any matters would merit the appointment of a Special Counsel,” Sessions told Huber.

More than two years later the investigation is concluding.

It has found nothing – ending “with no tangible results,” the Post notes, because there was never any “there” there.

Both current and former “law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.”

The cost to taxpayers is unknown.

The cost to Clinton’s reputation can be guessed, given also that the investigation is ending in silence.

There will be no FBI Director holding a press conference clearing Clinton. There will be no Attorney General apologizing. There will be nothing but yet another failed attack on Hillary Clinton, millions more of the taxpayers’ dollars taken from the Treasury’s coffers, all to prop up an actual political witch hunt and conspiracy theories that have made Republicans and the conservative media rich.

The beneficiaries, of course, are President Trump and the GOP, who have raised countless fortunes from suckered voters certain that “Crooked Hillary,” as Trump has called her – on Twitter alone – 379 times, is guilty.

She is not.

What happens next?

Nothing.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/youre-probably-more-susceptible-to-misinformation-than-you-think/

no links

You’re probably more susceptible to misinformation than you think

Written by The Conversation January 11, 2020

Online misinformation works, or so it would seem. One of the more interesting statistics from the 2019 UK general election was that 88% of advertisements posted on social media by the Conservative Party pushed figures that had already been deemed misleading by the UK’s leading fact-checking organisation, Full Fact. And, of course, the Conservatives won the election by a comfortable margin.

Internet firms such as Facebook and Google are taking some steps to limit political misinformation. But with Donald Trump aiming for reelection in 2020, it seems likely we’ll see just as many false or misleading statements online this year as in the past. The internet, and social media in particular, has effectively become a space where anyone can spread any claim they like regardless of its veracity.

Yet to what degree do people actually believe what they read online, and what influence does misinformation really have? Ask people directly and most will tell you they don’t trust the news they see on social media. And a landmark study in 2019 found 43% of social media users admitted to sharing inaccurate content themselves. So people are certainly aware in principle that misinformation is common online.

But ask people where they learned about the “facts” that support their political opinions, and the answer will often be social media. A more complex analysis of the situation suggests that for many people the source of political information is simply less important than how it fits with their existing views.

Spurious thinking

Research into the UK Brexit referendum and 2017 general election found that voters often reported making their decisions based on highly spurious arguments. For example, one voter argued that Brexit would stop the takeover of the British high street by foreign companies such as Costa Coffee (which was British at the time). Similarly, a Remain voter spoke of mass deportations of any non-UK born resident if the country left the EU, a much more extreme policy than anything actually put forward by politicians during the campaign.

During the 2017 election, various claims were made by survey respondents that unfairly questioned Conservative leader Theresa May’s humanity. For example, some falsely argued she enacted laws that led to flammable cladding being placed on the exterior of Grenfell Tower, the London block of flats that caught fire in June 2017, killing 72 people. Others called her Labour opponent Jeremy Corbyn a terrorist sympathiser, or a victim of a conspiracy to discredit him by the military and industrial elites. The common thread was that these voters gained the information to support their arguments from social media.

How do we explain the apparent paradox of knowing social media is full of misinformation and yet relying on it to form political opinions? We need to look more widely at what has become known as the post-truth environment. This involves a scepticism of all official sources of news, a reliance on existing beliefs and biases formed from deeply held prejudices, and a search for information that confirms bias as opposed to critical thinking.

[Read more:

Why people vote for politicians they know are liars]

People judge information on whether they find it believable as opposed to whether it is backed by evidence. Sociologist Lisbet van Zoonen calls this the replacement of epistemology – the science of knowledge – with “i-pistemology” – the practice of making personal judgements.

A lack of trust in elite sources, in particular politicians and journalists, doesn’t fully explain this large-scale rejection of critical thinking. But psychology can provide some potential answers. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky developed a series of experiments that explored under what conditions humans are most likely to jump to conclusions about a specific topic. They argue intelligence has little impact on making ill-informed judgements.

Intelligence tests demonstrate the capacity to perform logical reasoning, but cannot predict that it will be performed at every moment it is needed. As I have argued, we need to understand the context of people’s decisions.

The average undecided voter is bombarded with arguments from political leaders, especially in marginal seats or swing states that can make a difference to the outcome of an election. Every politician offers a redacted account of their or their opponents’ policies. And voters are aware that each of these politicians is trying to persuade them and so they retain a healthy scepticism.

The average voter also has a busy life. They have a job, perhaps a family, bills to pay and hundreds of pressing issues to address in their daily lives. They know the importance of voting and making the right decision but struggle to navigate the contested election communication they receive. They want a simple answer to that age-old conundrum, who most or who least deserves my vote.

So instead of conducting a systematic critical analysis of every piece of evidence they encounter, they look for specific issues that they see as driving a wedge between the competing politicians. This is where fake news and disinformation can be powerful. As much as we like to think we’re good at spotting fake news and being sceptical of what we’re told, we’re ultimately susceptible to whatever information makes it easiest to make a decision that seems right, even if in the long term it may be wrong.The Conversation

Darren Lilleker, Associate Professor of Political Communication, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/a-historical-turning-point-paul-krugman-warns-that-disaster-in-australia-is-a-sign-were-barreling-down-the-road-to-hell/

aha omfg the only way to save the world is to convince troglydites that we can make money doing it?! (which is nice, b/c we can but sheeesh!)

krugman correctly ID's tipping pt? he's a systems guy?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/a-historical-turning-point-paul-krugman-warns-that-disaster-in-australia-is-a-sign-were-barreling-down-the-road-to-hell/

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‘A historical turning point’: Paul Krugman warns that disaster in Australia is a sign we’re ‘barreling down the road to hell’

Written by Alex Henderson January 10, 2020

Although wildfires were causing death and destruction long before climate change, such disasters are getting worse: more common, more widespread, more intense. Climate change didn’t invent wildfires any more than it invented hurricanes, floods or tornadoes, but it is making them worse. Liberal economist and New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman, in a scathing column this week, warns that extreme events like the wildfires that have been devastating Australia are a preview of things to come — and he stresses that right-wing politicians who deny the reality of climate change are as great a threat as the events themselves.

“In a rational world,” Krugman writes, “the burning of Australia would be a historical turning point. After all, it’s exactly the kind of catastrophe climate scientists long warned us to expect if we didn’t take action to limit greenhouse gas emissions.”

But Krugman goes on to lament that “the world isn’t rational. In fact, Australia’s anti-environmentalist government seems utterly unmoved as the nightmares of environmentalists become reality. And the anti-environmentalist media, the Murdoch empire in particular, has gone all-out on disinformation, trying to place the blame on arsonists and ‘greenies’ who won’t let fire services get rid of enough trees.”

The “Murdoch empire” Krugman is referring to is, of course, the one led by 88-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a Melbourne, Australia native and founder of Fox News’ parent company, News Corp. One of the silliest talking points at News Corp. is that environmentalists are largely to blame for the Australian wildfires because they have been overly protective of the trees that are now burning.

As destructive as the Australian wildfires have been, Krugman warns, diehard climate change deniers are unlikely to be swayed by science.

“If a nation in flames isn’t enough to produce a consensus for action — if it isn’t even enough to produce some moderation in the anti-environmentalist position — what will?” Krugman asserts. “The Australia experience suggests that climate denial will persist come hell or high water — that is, through devastating heatwaves and catastrophic storm surges alike.”

Right-wing climate change deniers, according to Krugman, are as problematic in Canberra (the Australian capital) as they are in Washington, D.C.

“Very few of the people still denying the reality of climate change or at least opposing doing anything about it will be moved by further accumulation of evidence, or even by a proliferation of new disasters,” Krugman warns. “Any action that does take place will have to do so in the face of intractable right-wing opposition.”

One possible solution, Krugman writes, is to appeal to voters’ self-interest by promoting the economic and job-creating benefits of a Green New Deal.

“Can such a strategy succeed?” Krugman asks. “I don’t know. But it looks like our only chance given the political reality in Australia, America, and elsewhere — namely, that powerful forces on the right are determined to keep us barreling down the road to hell.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/heres-how-trump-weaponizes-crackpot-ideas-to-maintain-a-firm-grip-on-his-maga-base

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Here’s how Trump weaponizes crackpot ideas to maintain a firm grip on his MAGA base

Written by Alex Henderson January 10, 2020

If President Donald Trump is reelected in November, it won’t be because the majority of Americans share his views, but because of his ability to fire up his MAGA base, whip them into a frenzy, address their grievances and get them to the polls in large numbers. Trump, journalist Michael Kruse explains in a Politico article headlined “Trump’s Art of the Seal,” knows and understands his audience — and one of the things that has kept that audience excited is his ability to take fringe ideas, get them discussed in mainstream venues and weaponize them.

Trump has inspired widespread discussion of crackpot conspiracy theories ranging from birtherism (the racist claim that President Barack Obama was really born in Kenya instead of the U.S.) to the CrowdStrike theory — a belief that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election. It was Trump’s pursuit of the CrowdStrike theory, Kruse explains, that led to him being impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives.

During President Barack Obama’s first term, Kruse explains, Trump’s “proto-political operation was essentially a two-man team” consisting of veteran GOP operative Roger Stone and his protégé Sam Nunberg.

“One of Nunberg’s self-appointed tasks was to help Trump understand what the masses on the right really wanted, and one way he did that was by listening to MarkLevin’s increasingly popular radio show,” Kruse recalls. “The people who were tuning in most intently to Levin, Nunberg thought, were the people most likely to vote for Trump if he launched an actual bid.”

Nunberg, according to Kruse, helped Trump realize that the far-right Tea Party movement was as angry at the GOP establishment as it was at Democrats.

“The Tea Party, in the estimation of Levin and his listeners, didn’t start as a reaction to the liberal outrages of President Barack Obama — it started as a reaction to what they viewed as the inconsistently hardline conservative policies of President George W. Bush,” Kruse observes. “Amnesty for immigrants, for instance? An absolute no-go.”

As Trump’s movement grew, Kruse notes, it didn’t do so by appealing to conservative intellectuals.

“For the better part of the past half-century, Trump, 73, has extracted from an array of similar sources — from the New York Post’s dishy Page Six to the toxicity of Twitter to far-right websites and lowbrow TV — a knack for knowing what people want. Not all people, but many people.”

Poll after poll has demonstrated that Trump is unpopular with the majority of Americans. But among his hardcore MAGA base, he is still quite popular. And Kruse wraps up his Politico article by describing the stranglehold Trump maintains on the Republican Party in 2020.

“If Trump began his political ascent as a follower — cannily co-opting ideas that resonated with a certain segment of the electorate — in doing so, he clearly has proceeded to forge a following of his own,” Kruse explains. “He has become a leader of those who are willing to be led in this way, solidifying lockstep support from the agenda-setting base of his party as well as its kingpins and figureheads, who parrot him the way he once did Levin.”

ref

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/01/10/donald-trump-art-of-the-steal-096841

POLITICO

no lnx many

Trump’s Art of the Steal

How Donald Trump rode to power by parroting other people’s fringe ideas, got himself impeached for it—and might prevail anyway.

By MICHAEL KRUSE

01/10/2020 05:09 AM EST

Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for POLITICO.

Sometime soon, Donald Trump, the third president in the history of the United States to be impeached, is expected to face a trial in the Senate, charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Traced back to its roots, this is a crisis entirely of his own creation: He came across a sketchy scrap of information, a debunked piece of Russian propaganda relating to Ukraine, and he saw it as something he could use, to help himself and to hurt an opponent. He latched onto it, pumped it up, and passed it along.

Anyone wondering how the president could make this kind of mistake has missed something important about Trump’s rise. For as long as he has been in politics—in fact, for longer—he has been a ruthlessly effective practitioner of the art of parroting others’ most provocative, salacious ideas. “There are a lot of people that think …” “That’s what I heard …” “Some people even say …” His gossipy M.O. was a staple of his campaign, propelling his historic victory, but it also has driven the scandal that has consumed his presidency—“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike,” he said on the now well-known call last July with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

If what he was referencing sounded kind of like a dodgy talk radio rant, that’s not an accident. It’s a deliberate tactic, one that Trump was developing, and exploiting, from the moment he first seriously started to consider a run for the White House.

In the early to middle part of the previous decade, Trump’s proto-political operation was essentially a two-man team—there was Roger Stone, now a felon, and there was Stone’s protégé, Sam Nunberg. One of Nunberg’s self-appointed tasks was to help Trump understand what the masses on the right really wanted. And one way he did that was by listening to Mark Levin’s increasingly popular radio show. The people who were tuning in most intently to Levin, Nunberg thought, were the people most likely to vote for Trump if he launched an actual bid. “Donald Trump,” Nunberg told me, meaning his candidacy, meaning his victory, “would never have happened without Mark Levin.”

[Billionaire real estate developer Donald Trump, left, walks to the Federal Courthouse in Newark, N.J., with Roger Stone, the director of Trump's presidential exploratory committee Monday, Oct. 25, 1999, for the swearing-in of Trump's sister as a federal appeals court judge. In a prelude to his possible presidential bid, Trump quit the Republican Party Monday and joined New York's wing of the Reform Party setting the stage for a possible presidential nomination battle with Pat Buchanan.

Donald Trump, photographed in Oct. 1999, with Roger Stone, the director of his presidential exploratory committee, walking behind him. | AP Photo]

Nunberg’s frequent emails to Trump, sent via an assistant in Trump’s office and which have not been reported on before, were accounts of the many grievances that animated Levin and his listeners. Union members resented union leaders. Republican rank and file loathed Republican elites. The Tea Party, in the estimation of Levin and his listeners, didn’t start as a reaction to the liberal outrages of President Barack Obama—it started as a reaction to what they viewed as the inconsistently hard-line conservative policies of President George W. Bush. Amnesty for immigrants, for instance? An absolute no-go. Trump, Nunberg stressed when we talked, didn’t want to be told what to say, but Nunberg nonetheless made his pitch for him as an insurgent outsider: “This is all marketing and you’re a great product … in a new type of market,” he said he told Trump. “Help me help you sell gold to these people that normally buy gold.”

Trump started listening to the show.

“He would call me up sometimes,” Nunberg recalled. “‘Oh, did you just hear what Levin said?’”

For the better part of the past half-century, Trump, 73, has extracted from an array of similar sources—from the New York Post’s dishy Page Six to the toxicity of Twitter to far-right websites and lowbrow TV—a knack for knowing what people want. Not all people but many people. And not what they say they want, but what they really want. Ostentatious and aspirational glitz. Plain talk to the point of crude talk. Conflict.

Employees, executives, aides and others who’ve known Trump well say he’s not a book-reader so much as a room-reader, “sucking in information that he finds valuable,” grabbing “nuggets” that he thinks can help him get what he covets, which is some slurry of wealth, attention, respect and power. “A creature of feel,”the late strategist Pat Caddell described him to me in the summer of 2018, “a visceral stimulus creature”—who could repackage what he took in and sell it back to the hoi polloi.

In 2010, for example, he recognized a lightning-rod issue torquing emotions and jumped right in, gleaning buzz for himself with his offer to purchase the site of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”—which alerted him to the potential potency of anti-Obama birtherism, which paved the way for his anger-girded, fear-mongering presidential candidacy. Trump is in this way less a thinker and more a megaphone, an amplifier of the ideas of others, the value of those ideas in his mind based not on veracity so much as utility. Which is another way of saying he’s not so much a leader as he is a follower. Perhaps the ultimate follower. Trump is the Follower of the Free World.

[Top: People protest a mosque construction near Ground Zero during a New York City Landmarks Commission vote in 2010. Bottom: A copy of President Barack Obama's long form birth certificate sits on a reporter's lap in the White House Briefing Room on April 27, 2011, after the administration released the document following extended criticism by those who did not believe he was born in the United States.

Top: People protest a mosque construction near Ground Zero during a New York City Landmarks Commission vote in 2010. Bottom: A copy of President Barack Obama's long form birth certificate sits on a reporter's lap in the White House Briefing Room on April 27, 2011, after the administration released the document following extended criticism by those who did not believe he was born in the United States. | Getty Images]

“Donald was never a CEO. He was a brand manager—you know, how do I appeal to the masses?” former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me recently. “It’s like Elmer Gantry. It’s the carnival barker. It’s what every pitchman has always done. Tell the people what they want to hear.”

“Taking the information he wants or needs,” former Trump casino exec Jack O’Donnell said.

“Whether it’s true or not,” former Trump Organization exec Barbara Res said.

Taking it in. Sending it out. Over and over. Again and again.

This, regardless of whatever else it is or means, is a remarkable and undeniable talent: hoovering others’ ideas, making them his, and in doing so growing a following uniquely his own that far exceeds the size of the even considerable original audience. AMP It’s what got him elected. In some ways, too, it’s what got him impeached.

“There’s no question,” presidential historian Doug Brinkley told me last week. “He just trolls around and looks for weird stories that grab his attention, and he figures, ‘I know the American psyche, and this’ll grab their attention,’ and he throws it out there.”

But effective as cherrypicking and amplifying the most emotionally and politically useful tidbits has been for Trump throughout his life, it has proved an uneasy fit when practiced from the inside of an office that is supposed to represent the accumulated knowledge and official position of the entire U.S. government. In some sense, the entire impeachment process is a collision between Trump’s magnification of random, unverified rumors and an official regime of fact and process. The outcome will determine more than whether Trump is removed from office. It may well establish a new standard for what our government defines as true.

Speedy with job-site arithmetic but dismissive of academics, whom he considered weak and effete, Fred Trump Sr. of Queens, N.Y., bestowed upon his middle son and eventual heir not just extravagant riches but an anti-elitist, expertise-averse worldview. At New York Military Academy, at Fordham University in the Bronx and then the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, classmates have said, a young Donald Trump was a “disinterested,” skyscraper-doodling student, “loath to really study much,” game to “bluff his way through.”

But the fact that he wasn’t a scholar didn’t mean that he was stupid, according to people who worked with or watched him closely over the decades of his professional existence.

[Donald Trump (L), owner of the New Jersey Generals of the U.S. Football League, said his league’s $1.32 billion antitrust suit against the National Football League will crack “one of the great monopolies in the is country.” At right is his attorney Roy Cohn.

Donald Trump and his attorney Roy Cohn in October, 1984. | Getty Images]

“If he’s willing to listen, he’s a quick learner,” Res said.

“A quick study,” biographer Gwenda Blair concurred.

“Donald just absorbs, absorbs, absorbs,” former Trump Organization executive Louise Sunshine said. “He can extract so much information from his awareness of his surroundings and of the world around him.”

Starting in the 1970s, he learned, of course, how to fight dirty and win from his antagonistic attorney and mentor, Roy Cohn.

In the ’80s, he learned from Stone, and from watching George Steinbrenner, Ed Koch and Ronald Reagan, too. Steinbrenner, the bombastic owner of the New York Yankees, led as a loner. His secretary frequently could be heard saying, “Mr. Steinbrenner, Trump on line 2”. Koch won three terms as the mayor of New York in part “by playing the kibitzer,” wrote Martin Shefter, “the brash fellow who has an opinion on everything.” The formula for success, Koch thought, was relatively uncomplicated: Get attention to get votes. “And you can only do that,” he once said, “by being bigger than life. It’s theatrics.” Staging news conference after news conference, Koch packed the way he talked with superlatives, “best this” and “best that.” Reporters joked about having to join gyms just to keep up with him. But he seldom left them wanting for material. He called foes “wackos” and “kooks.” He called the city council “a gaggle of clowns.”

Reagan, meanwhile, won the Oval Office in one way not dissimilar to Koch’s path to Gracie Mansion—by winning over blue-collar, disaffected Democrats, who sought “safety” in the face of the changing, increasingly diverse society surrounding them. Reagan spent the decade blurring the lines between politics and entertainment, wondering at times how anybody could be an effective president without having been an actor first.

For Trump, the “visceral stimulus creature,” Steinbrenner, Koch and Reagan provided daily tutorials of sorts. And while his political affiliations were elastic and his overall ideology embryonic, Trump demonstrated early his acumen for tearing pages from proven playbooks and giving them his own signature twists—with blaring full-page newspaper ads in the late ’80s, criticizing American foreign policy and calling for the death penalty for (the innocent) Central Park Five. AA

[Top: At the June 1978 launching ceremony of the new New York Hyatt Hotel/Convention facility that will be built on the site of the former Commodore Hotel are, from left: Donald Trump, Mayor Ed Koch, Gov. Hugh Carey and Robert T. Dormer, executive vice president of the Urban Development Corp. Bottom right: President Reagan shakes hands with Donald Trump at a White House reception for members of the Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies Foundation. Bottom left: New York Yankees manager Billy Martin, standing, meets developer Donald Trump at Municipal Stadium in West Palm Beach in March 1988. Seated with Trump are his son Donald, 10, with a ball given to him by Martin, and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.

Top: At the June 1978 launching ceremony of the new New York Hyatt Hotel/Convention facility that will be built on the site of the former Commodore Hotel are, from left: Donald Trump, Mayor Ed Koch, Gov. Hugh Carey and Robert T. Dormer, executive vice president of the Urban Development Corp. Bottom right: President Reagan shakes hands with Donald Trump at a White House reception for members of the Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies Foundation. Bottom left: New York Yankees manager Billy Martin, standing, meets developer Donald Trump at Municipal Stadium in West Palm Beach in March 1988. Seated with Trump are his son Donald, 10, with a ball given to him by Martin, and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. | AP/Ronald Reagan Presidential Library/Getty]

And in the ’90s, Trump learned from watching Ross Perot run for president (and lose) and Jesse Ventura run for governor of Minnesota (and win). “The nutty billionaire and the wrestler,” he called them, according to Stone. He watched Newt Gingrich weaponize words in the political arena in a new and virulent manner, labeling Democrats “traitors” and “sick,” urging his fellow Republicans to do the same. He watched the rise ofpartisanship on cable TV, MSNBC on the left, Fox News on the right, and the spiking clamor for conservative talk radio—from 240 all-talk stations in the country in 1987 to 900 in ’92 to 1,130 in ’95. Rush Limbaugh, the trailblazer, the precursor to somebody like Mark Levin, railed away about “feminazis” and “commie-libs”—and his listeners loved it. “He’s saying what I think,” they thought.

And Trump in 2011 seized on what people, some people—misguided, bigoted or both—thought about the country’s first black president. The birtherism campaign he began to wage was the distillation of his scattershot but resolute education as the kibitzer, the gossip hound, the insurgent outsider, the nascent politician, the feeder off the fever swamps. The follower.

“I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country,” he said on Fox News in March of that year.

“He doesn’t have a birth certificate,” he told talkerLaura Ingraham two days later.“Somebody told me …”

“A lot of people do not thinkit was an authentic certificate,” he said on CNN in 2012, long after the White House released Obama’s “long form” birth certificate.

[Mark Levin speaks, with President Donald Trump behind him, during a ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Attorney General Edwin Meese, in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2019, in Washington.

Mark Levin speaks during a ceremony at the White House in 2019. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo]

“Was it a birth certificate?You tell me,” he told ABC News in 2013. “Some people saythat was not his birth certificate.”

That same year, Nunberg arranged for Trump to make his Levin show debut, preparing a memo “to familiarize Mr. Trump with Mark Levin,” he wrote—deploying tried-and-true ways to pique Trump’s interest. Nunberg emphasized Levin’s ratings history (“In the first 18 months on the air, the program jumped to #1 in the time slot”), the company he kept (considersSean Hannity “his best friend”),his reach (books Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America sold more than a million copies, Nunberg noted), and his compensation (“a reported annual salary of $12.5 million a year”). Nunberg mentioned, too, that what he said on the air often was disseminated on a variety of websites like TheRightScoop.com. People, in other words, “some people,” “many people,” “a lot of people,” were listening to what Levin was saying.

Armed with this advance work, the memo as well as the emails, Trump fit in well with Levin. In addition toshilling for the upcoming season of “The Celebrity Apprentice”—“Trace Adkins, La Toya Jackson, Dennis Rodman”—Trump delivered to Levin’s listeners what they wanted—which essentially was … Levin’s ideas, studiously collected by Nunberg, consumed by Trump and regurgitated back to the host.

“If the Republicans are going to win,” Trump said, “they’re going to have tobreak away from the Karl Roves of the world and, frankly, get more involved—you know, the Tea Party, these people are great. I’ve done some speeches in front of theTea Party.They are great Americans, they love this country, they work so hard, and they have been so mistreated by … the liberal media. … They truly are not treated with proper respect.”

And he landed especially hard on immigration and any notions of amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

“I watched last night,” he continued, referring to Obama’s State of the Union that year, “as Senator McCain and everybody were jumping up and down, you know, applauding—I never saw him move so fast, you know, nice guy, but he jumped up—and was applauding as soon as the immigration became a part of the discussion, a part of the speech.”

“Immigration,” Trump said, “will be the next thing, based on what I’m watching.”

Trump and Levin wrapped up by exchanging compliments.

“I’m extremely impressed with what you’re doing,” Levin said.

“You just have a great show,” Trump said. “I’m always listening.”

“Donald Trump,” Levin told his listeners after Trump signed off.“See that, folks? Very solid. Very conservative. To the right of the Republican establishment. Strong supporter of the Tea Party.I’m telling you. I’ve been watching this. I’ve been listening. People have been sending me his tweets.”

There was a reason for that. “He’s putting stuff out there,” Nunberg told me of Trump’s tweets at the time, some of which Nunberg was suggesting, “that sounds like Mark Levin.” FEEDBACK LITERALLY

In the few months before his interview with Levin:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Obama weak on immigration. All words, no action. He's been Prez 4 years.

197

6:12 PM - Oct 16, 2012

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987 people are talking about this

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Obama is laughing at Karl Rove & all the losers who spent hundreds of millions of dollars and didn’t win one race, including the big one!

1:05 PM - Dec 3, 2012

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349 people are talking about this

And in the few months after:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Whether you like it or not, Bush also gave us Obama!

8:12 AM - Jun 27, 2013

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190 people are talking about this

This ear-to-the-proverbial-ground political ramp-up wasn’t limited to Levin and talk radio. It was around this time as well that Trump began to give more and more talks on the pre-presidential hustings, GOP chicken dinners in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.

He talked to Pat Caddell about what he was picking up on the trail.“He would put forth his position or his feelings, and he would judge the level of the response to it, and that helped him organize, I suppose to whatever degree it was organized, his views about issues,” Caddell told me in 2018. “Things he said that didn’t go over disappeared. Things that did stayed.”

Twitter, too, increasingly served a similar purpose.

“He glommed onto it like it was an oxygen source,” Caddell explained. “And he would tweet what he believed, and people would retweet or answer or whatever, and it was kind of his ongoing focus group.”

“He loved it,” Nunberg said. “He doesn’t trust the political people who do the focus groups.” Instead: “What are we getting the most retweets on?”

In 2014 and ’15—well before Trump came down the escalator and announced his intention to run—Nunberg sent Trump nearly daily updates of snippets of news and possible topics and wordings for tweets. At the tops of the documents he showed the number of Trump’s Twitter followers ticking up (a snapshot from December of 2014: 2,751,488 … 2,753,548 … 2,757,190 …) and the number of days left until the GOP primary debate at the Reagan library and the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries ticking down.

A month into the presidential campaign, after the Vietnam-avoiding Trump insulted McCain by saying he was “not a war hero” and that he liked people “who weren’t captured,” he refused to apologize. That, Nunberg said, partly was because of what he had internalized by listening to Levin. Nunberg told Trump it was going to help him. (It certainly didn’t hurt him.) “He said, ‘Why?’” Nunberg said. “And I said, ‘Because our people despise John McCain. They despise the fact that McCain hides behind his military record to shit on Republicans and you can’t criticize him on anything because of his military record. I said, ‘John McCain—he is hated almost as much as Barack Obama on talk radio.’ … I said, ‘He might as well be Barack Obama on talk radio.’”

Talk radio led the way. Trump followed.

Theoretically, Trump could have changed. As successful as this pattern of behavior had been in the years preceding his run and during the campaign itself—he was, after all, elected president—Trump could have adjusted once he took office, having at his disposal, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, the world’s preeminent intelligence-gathering apparatus. But no—sticking to “that gossip kind of mentality,” said O’Donnell, the casino exec, Trump has continued to mine Twitter, plucking what he wants, “very comfortable with half thoughts,” “always looking for tidbits of information that he can use to his advantage.”

“He sees the ones that are the most popular,” former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling, identified by Time as someone who speaks regularly to Trump, told the magazine in June of 2018, “and getting the most [of the] zeitgeist, most attention on social media.”

And then? The last and most important piece of this by now almost rote process?

“He repeats it,” Bolling said.

[BEDMINSTER TOWNSHIP, NJ - NOVEMBER 20: (L to R) President-elect Donald Trump and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani shake hands following their meeting at Trump International Golf Club, November 20, 2016 in Bedminster Township, New Jersey. Trump and his transition team are in the process of filling cabinet and other high level positions for the new administration.

President-elect Donald Trump and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani shake hands at Trump International Golf Club in New Jersey, days after the election in Nov. 2016. Giuliani would go on to become President Trump's personal attorney. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images]

And for as long as he’s occupied the Oval Office, Trump’s been thinking about Ukraine.“Ukraine,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said a couple months back, “has always been problematic, from Day One. He’s heard a lotabout Ukraine from a lot of people.” He’s heard about it, according to reports, from RudyGiuliani, from his favored right-wing media outlets, from Vladimir Putin.

He started spreading it almost immediately.AMP

“I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian,” he said of CrowdStrike, incorrectly, in an interview with The Associated Press in April of 2017. “That’s what I heard.”

Officials have insisted to the president the CrowdStrike conspiracy is just that. He has not heeded their counsel.

It’s what led to the call with Ukraine’s Zelensky that led to the series of events that led to his impeachment. “The server,” Trump said, “they say Ukraine has it.”

“It’s combustible because Trump’s only looking for news stories and information that suits his persona, that build his persona up,”Brinkley, the presidential historian, told me last week. “And by doing that he is following the trolls down an ugly path.”

There are those who predict Trump’s tendencies will ultimately undo him. Thomas Bossert, who was Trump’s first homeland security adviser, logged a warning on a Sunday morning last fall. “If he continues to focus on that white whale,” Bossert said of Trump’s questionable Ukraine theory, “it’s going to bring him down.”

But it is hard to see that happening now. It’s virtually assured that Trump’s impeachment will end not with his ouster but with an acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate. This purported ordeal could even be a boost. In fundraising, and in some polling, it already has been. And come November, he absolutely could win again. And if that happens,Trump in some sense would possess more power than any president ever—subjected to the gravest constitutional check, then given by voters another four years.

If Trump began his political ascent as a follower, cannily co-opting ideas that resonated with a certain segment of the electorate, in doing so he clearly has proceeded to forge a following of his own. He has become a leader of those who are willing to be led in this way—solidifying lockstep support from the agenda-setting base of his party as well as its kingpins and figureheads, who parrot him the way he once did Levin. The result: a crescendoing feedback loop, in which followers are leaders and leaders are followers, perpetuating ideas based on what works rather than what’s real.

“One of the sacred principles in U.S. history has been that presidents are supposed to tell the public the truth,” Brinkley said. “So this is a new kind of Republican that refuses to ever admit culpability or a mistake and is willing to destroy not just institutions but fact-based thinking, empirical thinking.” Trump? “He doesn’t care whether it’s true or not true, whether it destroys somebody or not—there’s no morality into it. It’s just a strange, weird bit of information—‘and it helps me, and I’m going to propagate it.’”

note gulf war 2 b/c lie that saddam met w/ al-Q AND WMD; now vpence runs same play!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/mike-pence-shows-just-how-much-contempt-he-holds-for-the-american-public-with-tweet-containing-multiple-lies

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Mike Pence shows just how much contempt he holds for the American public with tweet containing multiple lies

Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos January 5, 2020

Donald Trump has lied over 14,000 times since taking office. Some of those lies are about the economy, some of them about his political opponents, and a surprising number involve Trump claiming credit for programs actually signed into law by Barack Obama. Trump’s been joined in his lies by members of his White House team, from Kellyanne Conway to Mick Mulvaney to Mike Pompeo, delivering a fat untruth with a sneer seems to be the primary qualification to join Team Trump.

But it’s a tweet posted by Mike Pence on Friday that may be the best illustration of the lies originating from this White House. Because it’s not just a lie, it’s multiple lies. Incredibly lazy lies. Lies so sloppy, with so little attention to history, reason, or anything else, that Pence should be forced to wear them eternally stapled to his massive white forehead.

In defense of assassinating Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Pence went through a long list of Soleimani’s supposed crimes. Among them “Assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.”

The list of reasons why this tweet is ridiculous is far longer than the original tweet. First of all, on the most straightforward point, there were 19 hijackers on 9/11. Not 12. A spokesperson for Pence has since launched a defense for this in saying that Pence was talking about a “subset” of the hijackers who traveled to Afghanistan through Iran. That statement also clarifies how Soleimani “assisted” these hijackers. He “allowed them to land” in Iran. A quick check of the records shows that Soleimani also allowed 4 million other people to land in Iran in 2001 alone. He was apparently a very busy fellow.

As many, many people have pointed out since Pence’s tweet, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. They didn’t just touch down in Saudi Arabia to change planes on the way to Kabul, they lived there—which would seem to make a lot of Saudi officials more bomb-worthy than Soleimani if that were the real basis of Trump’s action. More importantly, not only were the large majority of the hijackers Saudi, all of them were Sunni. So was all of al-Qaeda. The whole organization is composed of Salafist jihadists, a subset of radical Sunnis who regard Shiite Muslims as heretics worthy of death.

Attempting to tie the Sunni forces of al-Qaeda to the Shiite government of Iran may just signal that Mike Pence is astoundingly ignorant.But it certainly shows the disdain the whole Trump White House holds for the intelligence of the American public. And it’s not the only way they’re demonstrating their contempt.

Here’s the schedule for the top Defense Department officials on Friday.

Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense: No public or media events.

David Norqust, Deputy Sec. of Defense: No public or media events.

Mark Miley, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff: No public or media events.

John Hyten, Vice chair Joint Chiefs of Staff: No public or media events.

In the wake of an event that takes the nation to the brink of war, the Defense Department had nothing to say. The generals left it guys like Pence to distribute lies.

Pence isn’t even pretending to have secret intelligence that supports the death of Soleimani. Completely missing from his list of reasons is any detail about the supposed “imminent threat” that the general represented to Americans.

The reason for that is clear enough: The intelligence that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and others have been claiming supported the assassination of a foreign official, was just as absurd as Pence’s tweet.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-donald-trumps-perverse-brand-of-bs-took-over-american-politics

How Donald Trump’s perverse brand of BS took over American politics

Screengrab via Fox News.

Written by The Washington Monthly January 4, 2020

Are you tired of the limitless avalanche of B.S. from the White House, not to mention the well-oiled GOP mendacity machine? Are you worried that masses of “low-information” MAGA voters will gleefully upturn the American experiment and replace it with a racist, theocracy-infused non-stop reality show? Well, you have reason worry.

I used to be optimistic that the systemic antibodies embedded in our democratic structure would always tackle political infections like Trump. Indeed, I thought that would be enough to rid us of them. I am no longer. When a society is split into parallel universes—each with its own enclosed informational ecosystem, divergent values, and expanding mutual animus—expect the worst. If our functional democracy comes to a demise, the key catalyst will be our lacking a shared baseline of facts. Olympian liars like Trump (and his enablers) will be the handmaidens of destruction.

Of the more than 15,000 lies (about 14 per day) Donald Trump has spouted since taking the oath of office, the fact checker PolitiFact has chosen his attack against the Ukraine whistleblower as its “Lie of the Year.” The reason: It “speaks to a falsehood that proves to be of real consequence and gets repeated in a virtual campaign to undermine an accurate narrative.” Simply put, Donald Trump is a bullshitter in a class of his own.

In his 2005 bestseller, On Bullshit, Harvard philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurter wrote, “Bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.”

Too many, unfortunately, are swayed by Trump’s lies. Despite the dozens of federal, state and congressional investigations against him, and the ever expanding indictments and convictions of his cronies, Trump’s approval ratings have stayed notably steady (in the low 40 percentile). What accounts for this?

00:23

00:38

Duke psychology professor Dan Ariely is not surprised. The author of The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, his research reveals that “People don’t mind so much if their politician lies because they think it’s for the common good.” In other words, they know their hero lies but don’t care.

That’s why populist opportunists like Trump hone their message to appeal to a person’s gut and not their reason. This is a tried-and-true tactic among autocrats. Joseph Goebbels grasped this concept fully. “The broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily,” he said.

Part of the problem is that the right has constructed a self-reinforcing structure of so-called “think tanks,” media outlets, and advocacy groups that constitute little more than an elaborate right-wing propaganda machine. In this self-contained ideological universe, loyalty to the tribe can often outweigh moral values.

There is a precedent for this. Post-World War I German society was polarized between insiders and outsiders, or what German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler describes as a “cartel of traditional power elites” versus “the onslaught of new forces,” comprising those frozen out of political and economic power. In this environment, wealth and income inequality grew. Then a powerful conservative media magnate gave Hitler positive news coverage.

Germany’s tragic fate provides some insight into the crisis we are facing today. Look at the violent clashes that have erupted in Charlottesville, Oakland, Portland, St. Paul, Fergusonand Baton Rouge. Instead of armies clashing on a field of battle, we are experiencing an uptick in riots.

In the backdrop, Trump and the GOP are sowing the seeds for the country’s unraveling—be it through voter suppression efforts, packing the courts, and an inflammatory, truth-immunized right-wing media. A disturbing consequence: Perhaps a third of Americans view those who call out this administration’s corruption and lawless actions as existential enemies. As George Orwell once put it, “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”

We have been through wrenching and divisive periods before. Eventually, we emerged healed, But today is different. A sizable portion of the country has walled itself off with the help of a balkanized media. It has become more radical, demonstrated a dwindling devotion to democratic norms and has come to view those with different worldviews as sworn enemies. This is how the societal seams then begin to come apart.

As we turn a new decade, America eerily resembles the charged atmosphere of the 1850s. It took an enormously bloody civil war to sort things out then. I’m not predicting a repeat scenario, but I fear our domestic instability could lead to more violence, which would then make it easier for foreign adversaries to take advantage of our weakness.

Once Trump is gone, it will take exceptional moral and political leadership to overcome the underlying causes of our current dysfunction. The first step will be to abandon Trump’s perverse form of bullshit.

Fact checker reveals Trump stole credit from Obama with 1 outrageous lie 56 times in 2019

Travis Gettys / Raw StoryJanuary 1, 2020

President Donald Trump has repeatedly lied about a veterans bill that was actually signed by his predecessor. The president claimed credit for giving veterans a new health care option in…

not sure technically counts since we have the medic say he did it, but possible to did it after knife attack? in any case we have video testimony about other war crimes?

why Trump’s embrace of Eddie Gallagher is so dangerous

an 1219

no lnx

Why Trump’s embrace of Eddie Gallagher is so dangerous

Written by Heather Digby Parton / SalonDecember 30, 2019

Judging by his Twitter feed and a few appearances before the cameras, President Trump doesn’t seem to be enjoying his holiday break down at Mar-a-Lago. In fact, his tweeting is so obsessive and downright strange it even has some of his staunchest allies telling him he should put the phone down for a while. It’s obvious that the standoff between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is driving him to distraction. If that was part of Pelosi’s plan, it’s working.

Nonetheless, as I noted last week, this hasn’t stopped the merriment at Trump’s commercial resort property. Despite his assertion during the annual Christmas Day phone call to the troops that he works constantly when he’s at “the winter White House,” he’s been playing golf, hosting parties and hobnobbing with pals and paying guests.Among those honored guests was Eddie Gallagher, the former Navy SEAL who was accused of war crimes. The Daily Mail reported on the festivities in detail, including pictures of Gallagher and his wife with the president and first lady as well as Donald Trump Jr. Mrs. Gallagher reportedly gushed, “God bless the Trump family and all they are doing for this country!”

As you probably know, Gallagher was acquitted of murdering an injured ISIS fighter in a controversial military trial. After hearing about the case from Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth and former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik — a convicted felon and buddy of Rudy Giuliani — Trump took the nearly unprecedented step of interfering in the military justice system and ordering Gallagher released from pre-trial confinement. Despite Gallagher’s conviction on a lesser charge, Trump countermanded Navy commanders and restored him to his previous rank, allowing him to keep his SEAL pin, which resulted in the dismissal of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.

Trump has also pardoned two other members of the military accused or convicted of war crimes, even bringing them up on stage with him at a recent fundraiser. He has reportedly told allies he wants those men to campaign with him next year. We will almost certainly see them at the Republican convention. They are MAGA heroes.

Although Trump campaigned in 2016 by endorsing torture, atrocities and mass executions, even going so far as to proclaim that it was important to “take out the families,” it’s still shocking that he’s openly embracing accused war criminals, calling Gallagher “one of the ultimate fighters” and a “very tough guy.”

After the New York Times’ explosive story on Gallagher last Friday, in which we saw the original testimony of his fellow SEALs and footage of the moments before the killing of the sedated ISIS fighter, it’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around the idea that this man was feted at the “winter White House” just last week.

As the Times reported, this was “the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7,”

whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment. “The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.

The culture of the special forces requires a deep sense of loyalty and code of silence. It’s clear that the decision to come forward was very difficult, but what they had witnessed had obviously caused them great anguish. Gallagher says these SEALs accused him of all these crimes because they are cowards who were failing in their duties, and he has instructed his lawyer to sue the New York Times reporter who wrote the story. (You can see why he and Trump have formed such a bond.)

These anecdotes are overwhelming and disturbing. Seeing the text messages and the video of the witnesses makes it even more disturbing that Gallagher is still walking the streets, particularly since there is no dispute that he stabbed the sedated teenager:

Gallagher initially tended to the boy. Then according to seven members of the platoon, he stabbed him. One of them, Craig Miller, said he saw blood gush from the boy’s jugular, a stream of liquid like the kind that one sees when a baby is “throwing up.” Gallagher later texted his friends a photo of the dead boy: “Good story behind this,” he wrote. “Got him with my hunting knife.”

He was acquitted when one of the accusers, a medic who had been given immunity, explained that he was the one who had actually killed the stabbed teenager by cutting off his air-supply to end his suffering.

Nobody knows exactly what happened, but what with all the high-profile presidential interference and an apparently mishandled prosecution, Gallagher got off the hook. Perhaps that was the correct outcome. The state — in this case, the military — has to prove the case it brings and apparently failed to bring the right one.

But it’s impossible to see those videos and read those texts and come away believing that justice was done. Perhaps even more importantly, you can’t read that story and believe society is safe with Eddie Gallagher walking free, much less being treated as a hero by the most powerful man on earth.

The military itself has suffered a great wound as well. It would have been bad enough for Gallagher to be acquitted due to poor lawyering. But that’s how the system works, and sometimes guilty people get away with murder. But Trump’s interference has disrupted a delicate constitutional balance, in which the nonpartisan military is commanded by the civilian president and regulated by the U.S. Congress. As law professor Deborah Pearlstein wrote in the Atlantic:

Watching the president of the United States reward the violation of the most fundamental laws of war, inflaming America’s enemies and alienating America’s allies, was bad enough. But the president’s action appeared to be an intervention in otherwise semi-independent legal and disciplinary processes inside the military — an intervention for the purpose of currying favor with his political base. The pardons — driven by Fox News and reinforced by political rallies — added to the appearance, and reality, that the president regards the military as a tool of partisan politics, not as an institution whose unique constitutional position he has a duty to protect.

The military was the last government institution his ignorance and solipsism hadn’t managed to compromise. But he has finally gotten to that as well.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/busted-new-york-times-catches-trump-falsifying-quotes-he-tweets-to-his-67-million-twitter-followers

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BUSTED: New York Times catches Trump falsifying quotes he tweets to his 67 million Twitter followers

U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Delano Scott

Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story December 21, 2019

On the same day Columbia University busted a top Trump administration official for plagiarizing, The New York Times busted the president of the United States for tweeting false quotes to his huge Twitter following.

“Watching Fox News ahead of Wednesday’s impeachment vote, President Trump gave a Twitter call out to one of his most combative allies in the House,” Times reporters Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman explained.

“In his tweet, Mr. Trump quoted approvingly from what Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, had said on ‘Fox & Friends’ about the two impeachment articles passed by the House — that they were the product of Democrats who ‘couldn’t find any crimes so they did a vague abuse of power and abuse of Congress, which every administration from the beginning has done.’ But in fact, Mr. Collins never made the claim that “abuse of power and abuse of Congress” were common practices of past administrations,” the newspaper reported.

That incident was part of a pattern documented by The Times.

“The Wednesday morning post was just the latest example of Mr. Trump, who rails against the ‘Fake News,’ doing his own kind of editing of comments made by top administration officials and other prominent allies,” the paper reported. “Mr. Trump has made a habit of injecting his own words into the comments of people he sees on television and then publishing them as direct quotes on Twitter, where he has more than 67 million followers.”

And most Republicans just go along with it.

“More often than not, the allies who Mr. Trump misquotes do little to publicly contradict him. Sometimes a lawmaker’s office will simply point reporters to the transcript when asked about the disconnect. They rarely call out Mr. Trump for spreading falsehoods or altering the meaning of their words,” The Times reported.

Annie Karni

@anniekarni

.@ruthbenghiat: "“He’s challenging them to correct him. This is how a cult of personality works. The leader will say something that everyone knows is wrong, and no one will correct him.”

https://nyti.ms/2sL7DTc

The White House on Wednesday morning, hours before the House impeached President Trump.

Trump Has a Habit of Quoting His Allies on Twitter Saying Things They Never Said

The president frequently injects his own words into statements he claims his supporters said on Fox News or elsewhere. They rarely publicly correct him.

nytimes.com

Maggie Haberman

@maggieNYT

McConnell, McCarthy, Collins, Rick Scott have all been featured in Trump tweets with quotes attributed to them that there’s no record of them saying.https://nyti.ms/2sL7DTc

The White House on Wednesday morning, hours before the House impeached President Trump.

Trump Has a Habit of Quoting His Allies on Twitter Saying Things They Never Said

The president frequently injects his own words into statements he claims his supporters said on Fox News or elsewhere. They rarely publicly correct him.

nytimes.com

==

BOOKS

:{:{Antisocial media : how Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

Vaidhyanathan, Siva, author. 2018

Introduction: the problem with Facebook is Facebook -- The pleasure machine -- The surveillance machine -- The attention machine -- The benevolence machine -- The protest machine -- The politics machine -- The disinformation machine -- Conclusion: the nonsense machine.

https://www.amazon.com/Post-Truth-MIT-Press-Essential-Knowledge/dp/0262535041/

Post-Truth (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

Paperback

Lee McIntyre

4.0 out of 5 stars 63

$12.19

Are we living in a post-truth world, where “alternative facts” replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of “fake news,” from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into “information silos.”

What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples―claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote―and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism―specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth―in its attacks on science and facts.

McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

Hardcover

Michiko Kakutani

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Truth-Notes-Falsehood-Trump/dp/0525574824

hannah a, amuse to death postman

https://www.amazon.com/Weaponized-Lies-Think-Critically-Post-Truth/dp/1101983825

Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era Reprint Edition

by Daniel J. Levitin

:{:{Previously Published as A Field Guide to Lies

We’re surrounded by fringe theories, fake news, and pseudo-facts. These lies are getting repeated. New York Timesbestselling author Daniel Levitin shows how to disarm these socially devastating inventions and get the American mind back on track. Here are the fundamental lessons in critical thinking that we need to know and share now.}:}:

Trump claims oceans will rise less than an inch

President Trump dismissed the possibility of sea-level rise this week by suggesting that ocean water might climb imperceptibly over the next two centuries, a claim that's contradicted by government measurements.

By Scott Waldman in Climatewire 6:16 AM EST

driver on trump seal pardon? war crimes 2x called them warriors ~ deep state?!

aha:Rambo Syndrome (alt history)do we get to win this time,wimpy spineless bureaucrats prevented MANly am fighting men to beat primitive PJ comies:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/trump-is-trying-to-alter-the-truth-about-his-presidency-just-like-the-soviets-did/

no lnx

Trump is trying to alter the truth about his presidency — just like the Soviets did

Written by Martin Longman / The Washington Monthly November 28, 2019

Long before Photoshop was invented, the Soviets figured out how to alter photographs and thereby alter history. In the following example, you can see Nikolai Yezhov, the feared chief of the secret police during the worst of the Great Purge, whitewashed out of a photograph of Stalin. Yezhov was executed in 1940 after having served his purpose. He reportedly insisted on his loyalty to Stalin until the end, even declaring that he would die with Stalin’s name on his lips.

It wasn’t enough to simply kill Yezhov, however. Stalin wanted to eliminate him, as much as possible, from the historical record. That wasn’t an easy task for someone who was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and cropping him out of a photo seems so insufficient to the task as to be somewhat ridiculous. Still, it was Stalin’s version of, “I hardly knew the guy.”

As of October 9, 2019, the Washington Post had tallied 13,435 false or misleading claims by President Trump since he was inaugurated in January 2017. Among these are numerous denials that he said or did things that are well-documented. Among these are statements that he hardly knew people who worked closely with him or that minimized the amount or importance of their work. There are lies about Russia did in 2016 and lies about what Ukraine did not do in 2016.

One recent example of the former involves the U.S Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. On October 4, Trump minimized the statements of the State Department officials who were lining up to give depositions to Congress about Ukraine, “I don’t even know most of these ambassadors. I didn’t even know their names.” But Trump expected Sondland to have his back and called him “highly respected.”

He followed that up with a tweet on October 8, in which he wrote that Sondland “a really good man and great American.” Exactly a month later, on November 8, Trump stood on the South Lawn of the White House and said with a straight face, “Let me just tell you: I hardly know the gentleman.” On November 20, as Sondland was testifying on national television that Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo, Trump told reporters “I don’t know him very well. I have not spoken to him much. This is not a man I know well. He seems like a nice guy though.”

The truth is much different. Sondland had as many as 20 one-on-one phone calls with the president and was widely understood within the State Department to have direct and unusual access to both the president and his chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. In fact, he was effectively given the lead role on Ukraine in a May 23 meeting in the Oval Office, despite Ukraine not being a member of the European Union or an official part of Sondland’s portfolio. To demonstrate my point, the following is from acting assistant secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Reeker’s October 26, 2019 deposition before the House Intelligence Committee (see, e.g., pages 71-75 for his discussion of Sondland’s role). Reeker had just been asked if it is true that Sondland had been given “a rather large remit (for Ukraine) by the president”?

Deposition of Philip Reeker, October 29, 2019

The latest example of Trump trying to whitewash history came on Tuesday night when he claimed in an interview with Bill O’Reilly that he had not deputized Rudy Giuliani to help carry out his Ukraine policy.

Asked point-blank if Giuliani was acting on his behalf in trying to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden—an issue now at the heart of an impeachment inquiry—Trump said, “No, I didn’t direct him, but he is a warrior, he is a warrior.”

Let’s compare that to what President Trump said on the July 25 call with President Zelensky of Ukraine:

Trump is very clear there that President Zelensky is to take a call from Rudy Giuliani to discuss several issues, including the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. In fact, going back to the May 23 meeting in the Oval Office, Ambassadors Kurt Volker and Sondland were instructed to “talk to Rudy” so they could implement Trump’s instructions for Ukraine.

President Trump’s instruction in May to a U.S. delegation that had just returned from Ukraine made clear that his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was playing the driving role in shaping the president’s view of that country — and that top officials needed to cater to him, according to transcripts of testimony released this week.

“Rudy had some bad issues with Ukraine, and until Rudy was satisfied, the president wasn’t going to change his mind,” European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland said in his testimony to House investigators.

After the May 23 Oval Office meeting, Kurt Volker, then-special envoy to Ukraine, contacted Giuliani, attempting to court his support for U.S. foreign policy goals, and also put him in touch with a top Ukrainian official.

There is every indication that Giuliani may soon be indicted on a laundry list of crimes, and so now the president is finally realizing that he needs to create at least a little distance from him. Before long, he may try to tell us that he hardly knew Giuliani and rarely spoke to him. He can do this because he he has two things going for him. The first is a right-wing media Wurlitzer that plays his tune with little contradiction. The second is a mainstream media that does an excellent job of documenting his lies but feels compelled to offer “both sides” of every argument. When the Republican Party and high-ranking Republican officials adopt the president’s line, it gets reported as almost as credible as whatever the media or the Democrats are saying.

This is why you need organizations like the Washington Monthly that do not engage in both-siderism.At Political Animal we call bullshit on bullshit and we document the atrocities without feeling the need to get a quote from partisan hacks like Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham or Devin Nunes. That’s not “balance.” It’s amplifying lies and helping the president act like some modern day Josef Stalin.

As you know, traditional media outlets are cutting staff and going out of business at an alarming rate as the digital revolution continues to steamroll the industry of journalism. We don’t get bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, or some right-wing oil tycoon. We rely heavily on the support of ordinary readers like you. And if we’re going to survive to tell the true history of what is happening in this country, we need people like you to help us out.

1119 an

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: ‘I’ve been called’ to run for office — but ‘I don’t like being called a liar’

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

Huckabee Sanders may get a home in the governor's mansion, despite her well-documented lies.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-media-must-admit-that-the-republican-party-is-completely-detached-from-reality/

no lnx

The media must admit that the Republican Party is completely detached from reality

President Donald J. Trump talks to reporters outside the South Portico entrance of the White House Friday, July 5, 2019, prior to boarding Marine One to begin a weekend trip to Bedminster, N.J. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos November 15, 2019

Republicans proudly advertised their radical ways during Wednesday’s impeachment hearings into Donald Trump, wallowing in conspiracies and embracing debunked claims. The question now: How does the Beltway media cover a party that has aggressively removed itself from reality? How does the news business describe and treat a political party that routinely echoes the most unbelievable claims from Fox News and the darkest corners of the right-wing media?

The truth is, this is a decadeslong game of dare that Republicans have been playing with the press, as members of the party uniformly become more radical and more antidemocratic, and basically challenge the press to call them out, knowing full well it won’t happen. That’s because the Beltway press basically revolves around the central idea that there are two major competing parties in this country and that they are mirror opposites of each other. Republicans are just as conservative as Democrats are liberal. Republicans are just as serious as Democrats are. Republicans are just as fact-based and honorable as Democrats are. That false equivalency drives political coverage in this country, and has for decades.

Why this obsession? Because to concede that one party operates under a radically different set of guidelines (or no guidelines at all, in the case of the GOP), journalists have to do two things.They have to defend themselves against allegations of “liberal media bias,” and they have to throw out the old, dependable rule book that allowed the press to lazily suggest that Republicans and Democrats function on the same plane, and therefore had to be treated similarly.

But how on earth do you watch the Republican performances during the public impeachment hearings and still cling to that claim? How do you pretend a party that spent hours asking witnesses about Alex Jones-type conspiracy theories somehow functions on a parallel track with Democrats, who spent the hearings ensconced in facts, testimony, and firsthand witness accounts?

The equivalent would be if, during a 2002 congressional hearing, Democrats had spent hours badgering witnesses with 9/11 Truther questions, and the press had pretended that it was totally normal. It’s not! And neither is today’s irrational and reckless GOP.

The problem is that the press won’t accept that glaring fact. But there were signs after the first impeachment hearing that more and more D.C. journalists are willing to discuss just how far afield the Republican Party has gone as it follows Fox News down the rabbit hole. “We are living in a moment where we have a part of one of our major political parties that is just not accepting the premise, is just not accepting facts that are facts,” conceded NBC’s Chuck Todd.

Journalists really had no choice, given the stunning display Republicans put on at the hearings. And it wasn’t just one or two rogue members who used their time to push fictional narratives about Ukraine supposedly double-crossing the United States during the 2016 American election, or claimed that there’s simply no proof of an attempted “quid pro quo” with Ukraine, even though the White House transcript of a summer phone call with the country’s leader clearly spells out exactly that.

It was the vast majority of Republican committee members, as well as the GOP’s general counsel, who oversaw truly bizarre bouts of questioning that seemed to leave the witnesses at times stumped and confused, simply because the questions were not based in reality. Instead, they were based on close viewings of Sean Hannity’s television program.

It wasn’t spin or impassioned defense that was on display. It was up-is-down Orwellian rhetoric, and it had been telegraphed by Republicans for weeks, ever since the impeachment story broke, and ever since a parade of government officials began testifying about the obvious bribery scheme that was cooked up inside the White House. What happened with the hearings, though, was that the entire nation got to see the GOP’s descent into folly in full view.

But here’s the key point: Most casual news consumers don’t know that Republicans have become detached from reality as they watch the hearings unfold. (I mean, Republicans sound convincing when they spout convoluted claims about Ukraine working to elect Hillary Clinton.) And that’s why it’s important that journalists do their jobs and spell out what’s truly going on, and not depend on the lazy both-sides crutch in order to avoid necessary truth-telling about the state of today’s GOP.

This was a hallmark media failure during the Obama years, as the D.C. press steadfastly refused to report plainly on how radical the GOP was becoming. Republicans routinely obliterated Beltway precedents when it came to granting Obama the leeway that previous presidents were given by their partisan foes in Congress. Yet at each step along the way, journalists pulled back, refusing to detail the seismic shift taking place.Instead, news outlets portrayed the obstruction as routine, and often blamed Obama for not being able to avoid the showdowns.

We saw it with the GOP’s gun law obstructionism, the sequester obstructionism, the government shutdown obstructionism, the Chuck Hagel confirmation obstructionism, the Susan Rice secretary of state nomination obstructionism, the Hurricane Sandy emergency relief obstructionism, and the consistent obstruction of judicial nominees.

When Republicans wouldn’t allow a vote on the Obama-backed background check bill in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School gun massacre in Connecticut, even though the initiative enjoyed 90% public support, the press didn’t depict the obstruction as radical.Instead, the news media often blamed Obama for not being able to work with Republicans. (He doesn’t schmooze enough!)

When Republicans announced in the winter of 2016 that they would categorically ignore any Supreme Court nominee Obama put forward in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the press pretended that it was Obama who was sparking a “partisan” fight simply by fulfilling his constitutional duty.

The impeachment hearings confirm that Republicans have taken complete flight from reality. It’s the media’s job to say so.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/republicans-embrace-the-anti-truth-authoritarian-con-game-that-keeps-trumps-supporters-loyal-to-him/

impeach:

Republicans embrace the anti-truth authoritarian con game that keeps Trump’s supporters loyal to him

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly November 14, 2019

Donald Trump is like a car wreck: a horrifying scene that triggers our need to slow down and take a look. That is why, during the 2016 campaign, he was able to spend almost nothing on advertising, but got wall-to-wall coverage in the media.

So it makes sense that, beyond all of the attempts by the president’s enablers to craft some kind of defense during the impeachment hearings, the message they want to convey is that the whole ordeal is boring. In other words, it’s not a car wreck that anyone needs to slow down and pay attention to.

Several headlines demonstrate how some people in the media bought into that message. For example, Reuters reports that the hearing on Wednesday was “consequential, but dull,” claiming that the process began “without a bang.” The assumption behind that kind of analysis is that a circus is required for people to pay attention.

The other meta-argument Trump’s enablers are using as a defense is to accuse the witnesses of simply being partisan. E.J. Dionne captured that one perfectly.

Democrats hope that piling up evidence offered almost entirely by people with no political axes to grind will shift public opinion against Trump. Republicans hope to obscure the facts by arguing that there is no such thing as objective truth anymore because anyone who says anything critical of Trump must have a partisan motive.

That is exactly what the president is doing when he calls career public servants like Kent and Taylor “NeverTrumpers” and why Republicans are so determined to smear the whistleblower as partisan. The message was summed up by something Don Jr. retweeted during Wednesday’s hearing.

That message isn’t new to the impeachment hearings. Attempting to discredit critics by simply claiming that they are Democrats is something Republicans have been doing for years now. It was actually part of the master plan cooked up by Roger Ailes to promote Fox News. The idea was to suggest that objective reporting is infused with a “liberal bias,” so right wing media became the “balance” to mainstream media. That is precisely what led to the epistemic closure Julian Sanchez wrote about almost a decade ago.

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted.

The danger that presents to democracy was captured by Dionne when he wrote that, for Republicans, “there is no such thing as objective truth anymore.”As Peter Pomerantsev explained, the current iteration of the GOP has become completely aligned with Vladimir Putin’s approach to propaganda (emphasis mine).

:{[Information warfare] reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action…In today’s Russia…the idea of truth is irrelevant…

The point of this new propaganda is not to persuade anyone, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted—to disrupt Western narratives rather than provide a counternarrative…This is why it’s so important for Moscow to do away with truth. If nothing is true, then anything is possible.}:

If nothing is true, then lying is normalized and critics can simply be dismissed as partisan. That is the con game that keeps Trump’s supporters so loyal to him, no matter what.

Anyone who suggests that the impeachment hearings are dull or partisan should keep all of that in mind. One side is committed to laying out the facts in a serious manner and the other side thinks that’s boring, while claiming that there no such thing as objective truth.

Thomas Jefferson once said that “wherever people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” That does a pretty good job of summarizing what’s on the line right now. Rejecting an examination of the truth puts democracy in jeopardy

brilliant ***

no lnx

Trolls, conspiracy theorists, hoaxers and Trump have twisted Facebook, YouTube and the news to toxic levels — and it’s only getting worse

Written by October 14, 2019

It may be getting harder and harder to figure out the truth, but at least this much is clear: It’s a good time to be a liar.

We’ve spent three years arguing if fake news swung the 2016 election — debating whether the hordes of Russian bots, hoax Facebook pages and inflammatory, dishonest tweets tipped the democratic balance to elect Donald Trump as president.

Yet in those same years, we’ve learned that the stakes in the fight against truth, in a muddy world of social media platforms, go beyond politics.

In Brazil, public health workers were attacked after far-right activists lied on YouTube that they were spreading the Zika virus. In Myanmar, government soldiers used fake Facebook accounts to drive an ethnic cleansing, full of incendiary claims and false stories about Muslim minorities raping Buddhist women. Gunmen radicalized by false white-supremacist conspiracies on internet forums like 4chan and 8chan shot up a synagogue in California, a Walmart in Texas and mosques in New Zealand.

Elections have consequences. So do algorithms.

So now, heading into the 2020 election, experts are warning that trolls, hoaxers and dishonest politicians are arming themselves with a whole new arsenal of weapons of mass deception. New technology is making it easier to hoax audio and video, while advances in artificial intelligence are making it all the more difficult to weed out computer-automated “bot” accounts.

And there’s a deeper risk, beyond figuring out the inaccuracy of any one article.

The deluge of misinformation — full of Trump tweets, deepfakes, InfoWars videos, Russian bots, 4chan trolls, that Washington Post correction, those out-of-context memes and your great aunt’s latest questionable Facebook post — has become so overwhelming that some of us may simply give up trying to make sense of it all.

A lie doesn’t need to be believed. It just needs to create enough doubt that the truth becomes polluted. With enough pollution, it’s impossible to see what’s right in front of you.

“When you’re flooded with so much bullshit,” New York Times media columnist Charlie Warzel says, separating fact from fiction becomes so difficult that “the task of trying to do it becomes, you know, tiresome, so you just stop.”

It’s the sort of thing your college philosophy professor might call an “epistemic crisis.” We don’t know what to believe. Truth is hazy. Reality itself becomes irrelevant. It’s a phenomenon that has already happened in places like Russia and the Philippines — and experts say that in the past few years, the United States has suddenly found itself on the same path.

“And that, to me, is one of the scariest things to think about,” Warzel says. “It feels like we’ve come incredibly far since 2015.”

THE WEB OF CONSPIRACY

History has a pattern.

...

proPublica’s Peter Elkind joined “Trump, Inc.” to talk about his in-depth profile of Parscale in ProPublica and the political juggernaut Parscale is assembling to re-elect the President.

Here’s what Elkind says about Parscale and the stories he tells about himself: “He changes dates. He rearranges facts. He omits conspicuous events. He basically rewrites his own life story to become a more romantic tale, to fit into the image that he’s trying to convey. He is a promoter, he’s a hustler, he’s a marketer.” In short, Brad Parscale is a lot like his boss.

To find out more, listen to the episode.

919 cult corrupt different in kind not just degree/freq? related to post-truth?

trump inc pod

...we’ve done dozens of episodes over the past 18 months, detailing how predatory lenders are paying the president, how Trump has profited from his own inauguration and how Trump’s friends have sought to use their access in pursuit of profit.

We’ve noticed something along the way. It’s not just that the president has mixed his business and governing. It’s that the way Trump does business is spreading across the government.

Trump’s company isn’t like most big businesses. It is accountable to only one man, it has broken the rules, and those promoting it have long engaged in what Trump has dubbed, ahem, “truthful hyperbole.”...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/how-tumps-old-business-patterns-are-spreading-across-the-federal-government/

an 919 by

letting Trump constantly lie about 9/11, the press proves it will let him lie about anything

Eric Boehlert / Daily KosSeptember 15, 2019

Sometimes it feels like the press has just completely surrendered to Donald Trump’s relentless lies.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-divine-right-presidency-trump-has-identified-the-usa-with-himself-made-the-government-into-his-personal-servants-and-claimed-unprecedented-powers-to-do-whatever-he-wants/

king g iii

an 919

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/facebook-removed-doctors-fact-check-of-false-anti-abortion-video-because-ted-cruz-complained

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/disinformation-could-sway-the-2020-election-and-were-not-ready/

no lnx

Disinformation could sway the 2020 election — and we’re not ready

Written by The Conversation September 9, 2019

Paul M. Barrett, New York University

In 2016, Russian operatives used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to sow division among American voters and boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

What the Russians used to accomplish this is called “disinformation,” which is false or misleading content intended to deceive or promote discord. Now, with the first presidential primary vote only five months away, the public should be aware of the sources and types of online disinformation likely to surface during the 2020 election.

First, the Russians will be back. Don’t be reassured by the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency’s relatively negligible presence during last year’s midterm elections. The agency might have been keeping its powder dry in anticipation of the 2020 presidential race. And it helped that U.S. Cyber Command, an arm of the military, reportedly blocked the agency’s internet access for a few days right before the election in November 2018.

Temporarily shutting down the Internet Research Agency won’t be enough to stop the flow of harmful content. Lee Foster, who leads the disinformation team at the cybersecurity firm FireEye, told me in an interview that the agency is “a small component of the overall Russian operation,” which also includes Moscow’s military intelligence service and possibly other organizations. Over time, Foster said, “All of these actors rework their approaches and tactics.”

And there’s more to fear than just the Russians. I’m the author of a new report on disinformation and the 2020 election published by the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. In the report, I predict that the Russians won’t be alone in spreading disinformation in 2020. Their most likely imitator will be Iran, especially if hostility between Tehran and Washington continues to mount.

Disinformation isn’t just Russian

In May, acting on a tip from FireEye, Facebook took down nearly 100 Iranian-related accounts, pages and groups. The Iranian network had used fake American identities to espouse both conservative and liberal political views, while also promoting extremely divisive anti-Saudi, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian themes.

As Senate Intelligence Committee co-chair Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, has said, “The Iranians are now following the Kremlin’s playbook.”

While foreign election interference has dominated discussion of disinformation, most intentionally false content targeting U.S. social media is generated by domestic sources.

I believe that will continue to be the case in 2020. President Trump often uses Twitter to circulate conspiracy theories and cast his foes as corrupt. One story line he pushes is that Facebook, Twitter and Google are colluding with Democrats to undermine him. Introducing a right-wing “social media summit” at the White House in July, he tweeted about the “tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination, and suppression practiced by certain companies.”

Supporters of Democrats also have trafficked in disinformation. In December 2017, a group of liberal activists created fake Facebook pages designed to mislead conservative voters in a special U.S. Senate race in Alabama. Matt Osborne, who has acknowledged being involved in the Alabama scheme, told me that in 2020, “you’re going to see a movement toward [political spending from undisclosed sources] on digital campaigns in the closing days of the race.” He suggests there could be an effort to discourage Republicans from voting with “an image of a red wave with a triumphal statement that imbues them with a sense of inevitable victory: ‘No need to bother voting. Trump has got it in the bag.’”

Spreading fake videos

Also likely to surface next year: “deepfake” videos. This technique produces highly convincing – but false – images and audio. In a recent letter to the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, wrote: “A timely, convincing deepfake video of a candidate” that goes viral on a platform “could hijack a race – and even alter the course of history. … The consequences for our democracy could be devastating.”

Just one example of a deepfake video.

Instagram could be a vehicle for deepfakes. Owned by Facebook, the photo and video platform played a much bigger role in Russia’s manipulation of the 2016 U.S. election than most people realize, and it could be exploited again in 2020. The Russian Internet Research Agency enjoyed more user engagement on Instagram than it did on any other platform, according to a December 2018 report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis,” the report added.

Companies could step up

The social media companies are responding to the problem of disinformation by improving their artificial intelligence filters and hiring thousands of additional employees devoted to safety and security. “The companies are getting much better at detection and removal of fake accounts,” Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Platform Accountability Project, told me.

But the companies do not completely remove much of the content they pinpoint as false; they merely reduce how often it appears for users, and sometimes post a message noting that it’s false.

In my view, provably false material should be eliminated from feeds and recommendations, with a copy retained in a cordoned-off archive available for research purposes to scholars, journalists and others.

Another problem is that responsibility for content decisions now tends to be scattered among different teams within each of the social media companies. Our report recommends that to streamline and centralize, each company should hire a senior official who reports to the CEO and is responsible for overseeing the fight against disinformation. Such executives could marshal resources more easily within each company and more effectively coordinate efforts across social media companies.

Finally, the platforms could also cooperate more than they currently do to stamp out disinformation. They’ve collaborated effectively to root out child pornography and terrorist incitement. I believe they now have a collective responsibility to rid the coming election of as much disinformation as possible. An electorate that has been fed lies about candidates and issues can’t make informed decisions. Votes will be based on falsehoods. And that means the future of American democracy – in 2020 and beyond – depends on dealing effectively with disinformation.

]The Conversation

Paul M. Barrett, Deputy Director, Center for Business and Human Rights, Stern School of Business; Adjunct Professor of Law, New York University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-9-2019/

mickey huff US of distraction, 2nd 1/2

mma

By the time that Trump tweeted and then told journalists at the White House that Alabama would be hit hard by Hurricane Dorian, it was obvious that he was wrong. Instead of admitting that he was referring to well-out-of-date forecasts, Trump has spent a week insisting he was correct (including changing a map with a marker) and attacking media outlets who point out he was lying. Fox propagandists were the rare allies who leapt to his defense.

Sean Hannity had a full meltdown in defense of Trump, complaining of "psychotic jackasses in the media mob." When his guest - a prominent climate change denier - even said that Trump was wrong, Hannity began speaking over him and said that they were out of time.

Lou Dobbs seemed giddy about Trump continuing to keep pushing the lie, saying of the media: "You mess with the bull, you get the horn.” avoided filming violence from right-wing protesters. Geraldo Rivera said that Trump was "unfairly mugged by the media." Fox News host Howard Kurtz attacked the media for covering Trump's repeated lies about a natural disaster.

At one point this week, Trump even called Fox News' John Roberts into the Oval Office to talk with him about his statements.

This all raises the question of why Trump was relying on days-old information about a natural disaster. And aside from golfing, Trump spent a significant amount of time in the days that Dorian's trajectory turned away from Alabama livetweeting Fox News.

Trump tweets from his alternate universe about a windfall for famers as farm loan delinquencies surge in Wisconsin

Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos

As reports surface of farm loan delinquencies surging in Wisconsin, Donald Trump dispatched some news for farm country from his alternate universe. “Billions pouring into USA,” Trump tweeted Friday morning in defense of his trade

no lnx

Trump tweets from his alternate universe about a windfall for famers as farm loan delinquencies surge in Wisconsin

Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos September 6, 2019

As reports surface of farm loan delinquencies surging in Wisconsin, Donald Trump dispatched some news for farm country from his alternate universe.

“Billions pouring into USA,” Trump tweeted Friday morning in defense of his trade war. “Targeted Patriot Farmers getting massive Dollars from the incoming Tariffs!”

Meanwhile, back on Earth, U.S. News & World Report notes that Wisconsin’s community banks saw a record high number of delinquencies on farm loans in June. The percentage of past-due loans at community banks hit 2.9% in June, reaching rates that are comparable to those back in 2001.

The rate of Wisconsin farm loan delinquencies has doubled since Trump took office, soaring higher than in any of the other top-producing farm states. Nationwide, June saw some 1.5% of farm loans at FDIC-insured banks that were either 90 days past due on their payments or no longer accruing interest due to doubts of repayment.

Wisconsin farmers have been hit particularly hard because their crops had found markets in multiple countries impacted by Trump’s trade standoffs, including China, Canada, and Mexico.

Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by a narrow margin of less than one percentage point. Democrats are aiming to win it back in 2020.

BACK:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-cost-of-the-gops-degradation-could-be-the-death-of-the-party-itself/

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The cost of the GOP’s degradation could be the death of the party itself

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 6, 2019

Pollster and author Stanley Greenberg has written a book about the death of the Republican Party titled, “R.I.P. G.O.P.” Stephanie Mencimer wrote a review of it in the latest edition of the Washington Monthly. Noting that the author focused a whole chapter on J. D. Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy—which suggests that the challenges faced by people from his community were the result of “poor life choices that bore little relationship to larger economic or political forces”—Mencimer summarizes Greenberg’s point with this.

What bothers Greenberg most about Hillbilly Elegy is that many of Vance’s Republican enthusiasts (though not Vance himself) have concluded from the book that nothing can be done about the social collapse. Their takeaway, he says, is that “government activism is ineffective and counterproductive.” That crabbed view of government, Greenberg notes, has restricted Republicans’ ability to do much for the very voters who helped put Donald Trump in the White House. Once they were in charge, he notes, Republicans’ most significant policy initiative aimed at the working class was to add work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps. “Is that really all they have to offer working people?” Greenberg asks. “What an insult.”

This meager gruel is what helped fuel the blue wave election in 2018, Greenberg says. Republicans lost dramatically all across the industrial Midwest and the Rust Belt because it turned out that the non-evangelical working class “wanted more from Republicans than this anti-government trope.”

“Republicans would do well to unlearn the lessons of Hillbilly Elegy,” he concludes, if they want to remain relevant.

Mencimer is right to suggest that Republicans don’t seem interested in remaining relevant when it comes to policy. She echoes what Zach Roth suggested when he wrote that, at some point, the GOP decided that “being outnumbered didn’t have to mean losing.” Instead, they zeroed in on things like obstruction, voter suppression, and gerrymandering. More recently, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has demonstrated that he is content with undermining Congress while stacking the courts with extremists in an attempt to bypass the majority of voters.

But both Greenberg and Mencimer fail to address what Zak Cheney-Rice captured in an article titled, “A Non-Racist Conservative Movement Would Kill the Republican Party.” He focused on pieces from Ross Douthat and Timothy P. Carney, which articulated the same theme: “American conservatism has a racism problem,and conservatives who care must build a movement that is unwelcoming to racists.” Cheney-Rice points out the issue both Mencimer and Greenberg missed.

[I]t’s been apparent since the Nixon administration that the Republican Party would collapse without support from racists….In any case, the GOP hasn’t been able to convince most voters that corporate welfare, reduced protections for marginalized people, and diminished health-care options for all but the most financially secure are good things on their own terms, without using racism to sweeten the deal.

It was during the Nixon administration that a massive political realignment began. The so-called “party of Lincoln” launched its Southern Strategy following the passage of civil rights laws. As Cheney-Rice noted, “The mid-century black exodus from the GOP was no fluke or paranoid manifestation. It was a response to sustained antagonism toward their rights by Republicans.”

A critical part of this movement for Republicans was to become what David Roberts called the “post-truth party.”

Republicans thus talk about “taxes” and “spending” and “regulation” in the abstract, since Americans oppose them in the abstract even as they support their specific manifestations. They talk about cutting the deficit even as they slash taxes on the rich and launch unfunded wars. They talk about free markets even as they subsidize fossil fuels. They talk about American exceptionalism even as they protect fossil-fuel incumbents and fight research and infrastructure investments.

In short, Republicans have mastered post-truth politics. They’ve realized that their rhetoric doesn’t have to bear any connection to their policy agenda.

As Cheney-Rice articulated, the success of their “post-truth politics” depended on “using racism to sweeten the deal.” Meanwhile, the Cold War provided cover for their military interventionism all around the globe.

All of that came to a screeching halt near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. The “global war on terror” had become the substitute for the Cold War and resulted in the country being mired in two wars. Post-truth politics were destroyed by the Great Recession. The country responded by electing the country’s first African American president.

As I have often stated, that was the point at which the Republican Party faced a crucial question. Should they double-down on post-truth politics or re-evaluate their agenda? In many ways, they did neither. Instead, they launched their plan to obstruct anything Obama and the Democrats tried to do and became the “post-policy party.” Other than continue to support tax cuts for the wealthy, they pretty much abandoned the rest of the conservative agenda and zeroed in on simply being against anything Democrats supported. They didn’t, however, abandon racism as their cover.

In order to justify their total obstruction against Obama—even during the height of the Great Recession—narratives flourished about how the president was not really American, didn’t love his country, hated white people, and was probably a secret Muslim. Right-wing media carried the ball on most of those accusations, while Republican politicians simply looked the other way. That is what made John McCain’s moment of moral clarity stand out. On the other hand, it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump launched himself onto the national political stage by embracing birtherism. His eventual campaign was a hodgepodge of policy proposals, which he has mostly abandoned, while the racism remains.

As a result, the conservative agenda at this point was summarized pretty well by Cheney-Rice.

[T]he implementation of conservative policies means that migrant children are dying in cages, black voters are being purged from voter rolls by the thousands, Native lands are being plundered for oil infrastructure, and black mothers are losing their lives and babies because adequate health care is out of reach.

That is precisely why Mitch McConnell is happy to embrace the idea of being the “grim reaper.” He has no policy agenda, which is the ultimate conclusion for a party that has been built of the idea that “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.”

When it comes to the possible demise of the GOP, I don’t think that it is possible to predict what happens next because there are simply too many possibilities to consider. But it is nevertheless important to be clear about what brought us to this point. Heading towards the moment that white people become a minority in this country, the Republicans have positioned themselves such that, if they abandon racism, they have nothing.

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Right-wing media lash out after Walmart announces newest firearm policy

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Defending Trump's lie about Alabama and Dorian is peak Sean Hannity

Fox News' Howard Kurtz attacks the media for covering Trump's repeated lies about Alabama and Hurricane Dorian

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/confirmed-trump-lies-to-reporters-more-often-than-he-lies-to-any-other-group

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Confirmed: Trump lies to reporters more often than he lies to any other group

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos September 6, 2019

Press advocates scored an important legal victory this week when a U.S. District Court judge ordered the White House to reinstate media credentials to reporter Brian Karem, whose access had been stripped away by Donald Trump’s team after a dust-up during a Rose Garden ceremony in July. There, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka called Karem a “punk.” Announcing that the White House hadn’t provided Karem with due process when it stripped him of his credentials, the ruling marked the second time the White House has tried and failed to give a reporter the boot. (CNN’s Jim Acosta was the previous target.)

That’s the good news. The bad news? Karem is returning to what has largely become a useless White House beat. Permanently stuck in reactive mode as they respond to Trump’s catalog of bizarre and untrue pronouncements, journalists have largely become spectators at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

What’s left for the White House press corps to do often resembles a journalistic joke. The daily press briefings have been effectively cancelled, which means White House reporters have extremely limited access to officials who are willing to answer even the simplest questions about the administration’s policies and agenda. Meanwhile, the so-called White House sprays, where reporters are marched into a room and encouraged to shout questions at Trump (who then lies about everything), are relatively pointless. And that goes for the ritual of yelling questions at Trump while he stands near the whirling blades of a Marine One helicopter on the White House grounds as well.

In both cases, Trump simply uses reporters as props so they’ll record his avalanche of lies and then air those lies on a televised loop all day. The so-calledChopper Talk sessions in particular allow Trump to simply bluster and ramble through questions that clearly stump him. And because the sessions are strangely covered as breaking news, Trump’s lies are instantly amplified by the press, often without reporters providing proper context for them. The Marine One shoutfests “are terrible for reporters,” one White House reporter recently conceded to Politico. “It is impossible to hear, have a substantive dialogue, ask a follow-up question or do any serious pressing of the president. It is a fucking circus.”

Now comes confirmation that Trump spends more time lying to reporters in those gaggle settings than he does to any other group of people that he regularly interacts with in public. And yes, there’s something deeply ironic and disturbing about the fact that Trump lies to reporters more than anyone else, yet they’re the one group that won’t accurately label him a liar. The truth is that the press has never figured out how to cover a president who’s a pathological liar, and I suspect they never will. And when I say “figured out,” I’m really saying the press has never summoned the institutional courage necessary for the task.

Tracking every lie (aka “falsehood”) that Trump told between July 8 and Aug. 18, CNN concluded that heaveraged nearly eight fabrications every day. The biggest whoppers during that period were that China is paying for the trade war tariffs (they’re not), which Trump repeated 10 times, and that Democrats want to eliminate all immigration laws concerning America’s borders (they don’t), which Trump claimed 14 different times.

What was especially telling from the CNN research was the forum where Trump told the most lies during that six-week stretch. “The top venue, with 94 false claims, was his exchanges with reporters,” CNN reported. The venue that featured the second-highest number of Trump lies was the political rallies that he holds.

Why so many lies told directly to the faces of reporters? Because Trump in recent weeks has spent lots of time talking to journalists, hosting various Chopper Talk sessions that ranged from 17 minutes to 33 minutes in duration. And when Trump talks a lot, he lies a lot—period. “There is a strong correlation between how much Trump talks and how many false claims he makes,” CNN noted diplomatically.

CNN’s findings confirm recently released research that showed Trump much prefers granting reporters “access” while questions are yelled in a chaotic setting. According to the data compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project at Towson University, the shouting sessions make up 60% of Trump’s interactions with reporters, compared to just 17% of Barack Obama’s. To date, Trump has stopped more than 80 times for Q&A shout sessions while departing from or returning to the White House aboard Marine One, or on the tarmac before getting on or off Air Force One.

The White House has pointed to these shout sessions as proof that Trump’s delivering all kinds of access. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham recently bragged that Trump is “so accessible” that she doesn’t “know what any of the press could complain about.” It turns out what they could complain about is Trump using access he grants to the press to lie to them nonstop.

The CNN confirmation of Trump lying most often to reporters arrived the same week he unveiled perhaps the most ridiculous and moronic lie of his presidency—or least of the past month. That’s when Trump’s White House took a Sharpie marker to an official government map of the projected course of Hurricane Dorian, and enlarged the path’s possible cone to include Alabama. It was a pathetic and childish attempt to bolster his earlier, reckless assertion that Alabama was ever in danger from the storm, a claim that the National Weather Service aggressively debunked.

Trump lies about everything. Always. And that’s especially true when he grants access to reporters.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/patriotism-truth-and-fascism-donald-trump-is-creating-a-subjective-reality/

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Patriotism, truth and fascism: Donald Trump is creating a subjective reality

Written byChauncey DeVega / Salon September 3, 2019

At some point in high school, Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary and communications director Stephanie Grisham must have read George Orwell’s “1984.” Instead of understanding Orwell’s book as a warning about totalitarianism, however, Grisham took it as a “how to” guide.

This is from a profile of Grisham, published last week in the Washington Post:

Does Grisham think Trump ever lies? After all, as of Aug. 5, The Washington Post Fact Checker had documented 12,019 false or misleading claims made by Trump during his presidency.

“No,” she responds without hesitation. “I don’t think they’re lies. .?.?. I think the president communicates in a way that some people, especially the media, aren’t necessarily comfortable with. A lot of times they take him so literally. I know people will roll their eyes if I say he was just kidding or was speaking in hypotheticals, but sometimes he is. What I’ve learned about him is that he loves this country and he’s not going to lie to this country.”

Despite the thousands of documented lies Trump has told since becoming president, his media sycophants at Fox News and elsewhere continue to claim that he is an honest and truthful person. Because they are authoritarians who are comfortable with their leaders lying to them, Trump’s voters and other Republicans also believe that he is honest.

Grisham’s recent comments to the Post are also another example of a very dangerous overlap between Donald Trump’s subjective reality, politics and truth. When Grisham says, “What I’ve learned about him is that he loves this country and he’s not going to lie to this country,” she is asserting that patriotism — always a subjective and normative quality — is a litmus test for the truth. Given his egomania and narcissism, Trump certainly agrees with her. Objective reality is to be made secondary, if not wholly replaced and usurped by, the whims of a mercurial, unstable authoritarian.

The real world is swallowed up by TrumpWorld; Trump’s critics and other detractors are then excluded from reality itself — which in turn legitimates their silencing by any means available.

In total, Trump’s lies, and the media and political machine that disseminates and sustains them, are antithetical to democracy. This is not a precondition for fascism. It is fascism in action.

Moreover, those people and organizations who aid, abet and enforce his lies are also enemies of a good and humane society. Philosopher Hannah Arendt warned of this in her 1971 essay “Lying in Politics”:

[T]he historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life …. [I]t is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.

The Washington Post’s profile of Stephanie Grisham also reveals the worldview and collective character of the Trump regime and those people willing to serve it. In Grisham’s comments about her job as press secretary and communications director there is no mention of a commitment to public service, the common good or the well-being of the American people. Loyalty to Donald Trump is all that matters.The framers of the United States Constitution rejected the divine right of kings and queens and the idea of a hereditary nobility in America. Donald Trump is the human exemplar of why the framers put safeguards in the Constitution to remove such an authoritarian.

Donald Trump’s lies are a tool. They help him to assault the rule of law, cut away at democracy, profit from corruption and greed, normalize his illegitimate regime, and stay in power by distracting the American people and the news media from his political agenda, which presents a dire threat to the existence of America’s multiracial democracy.

Donald Trump’s lies represent another type of threat as well. Philosopher Henry Giroux demonstrates in his new book “American Nightmare” how Trump and his movement imperil the American people’s relationship to history and reality:

History not only grounds us in the past by showing how democratic institutions rise and fall, it is also replete with memories and narratives of resistance that pose a dangerous threat for any fascist system. This is particularly true today given the deep ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply worn into Trumpism’s rhetoric of retribution, intolerance, and demonization; its mix of schlock pageantry, coercion, violence, and impunity; and the constant stoking of ultra-nationalism and racial agitation.

Keeping historical memory alive is a form of resistance because it questions everything and complicates one’s relationship to power, oneself, others, and the large community. It also functions “to give witness to the truth of the past so that the politics of today is vibrantly democratic.” Historical memory matters because it offers a form of moral witnessing, and serves as a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized. The conditions leading to fascism do not exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises. Historical memory is a prerequisite to the political and moral awakening necessary to successfully counter authoritarianism in the United States today.

What can good Americans and other people of conscience do to survive and eventually triumph over Donald Trump and his movement’s full-spectrum assault on democracy and empirical reality?

First, they must vote in overwhelming numbers for the Democratic candidate for president — whoever that may be — in 2020. Democratic voters (and liberals and progressives more generally) must reject purity tests and unite behind their party’s presidential nominee. Supporting the candidate who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump and the Republican Party must be the overriding principle in 2020. Already imperiled, the future of the United States is at literal risk if Donald Trump is re-elected.

Good Americans and other people of conscience must also make a personal moral accounting. They need to ask themselves, “What am I doing in my day-to-day life to resist Donald Trump’s fascist movement?” Yes, sustained collective action is critical if the American people are to beat back this national and global crisis. But individuals must also stop waiting for other people to save them. Personal inaction is not a viable option. Passivity is complicity.

As others have suggested, all Americans — and all people around the world who are living through this global right-wing authoritarian moment — should maintain a journal or use some other means to document how the world around them is changing. Trumpism and similar movements are assaulting the very nature of reality itself. The Age of Trump is both a moral and political crisis that gains momentum and wins final power by shattering norms and creating a type of malignant reality and state of moral inversion. By documenting these changes, individuals can stay grounded and not be swept away by the lies and corrupting influence of Trump and his movement.

The personal must be the political, if Donald Trump and his version of American fascism are to be defeated. People of conscience should cease all communications with their relatives, friends, and other people in their lives who support Donald Trump and his movement. If that is not an option they should not discuss politics with anyone who supports Donald Trump. These people are willing members of a political cult. Trumpists cannot be freed until they choose to free themselves. Good Americans and other people of conscience should instead spend their energy supporting candidates and causes who are working to remove Donald Trump from office, blunting the harm he and his movement are doing in the present, and preparing to rehabilitate American democracy once Trump and other Republicans are removed from office.

You are not crazy. Trump’s defenders and other enablers accuse his critics of suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Such accusations are acts of projection. In reality, it is Trump and his supporters and enablers who are politically deranged, wallowing in a state of moral inversion, lost to malignant reality and mass political psychosis. They are waging a war on reality and truth, here in America and around the world.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/exclusive-disinformation-is-catalyzing-the-global-spread-of-authoritarianism/

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Disinformation is catalyzing the spread of authoritarianism worldwide

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

Written by Joshua Holland August 31, 2019

There’s a segment of the American left that believes we’re in no position to be outraged over Russia’s multifaceted campaign to swing the 2016 election to Trump because the U.S. has meddled in its share of elections in other countries. Setting aside the fact that this is a prime example of thetu quoque fallacy, it ignores the specific context of that intervention. The Kremlin didn’t help elect a generic Republican who is sympathetic to their interests–they worked on behalf of a clownish and corrupt narcissist who has no clue whatsoever about how to govern and has emboldened an ethno-nationalist movement that’s ripping the country apart.

But that argument also fails to grasp that this isn’t just about us. As I wrote for The Nation in 2017, long before Trump descended on that gaudy golden escalator to announce his candidacy with a rant about Mexico sending us their rapists, Russia had honed its tactics in Estonia, followed soon after by attempts, with varying degrees of success, to disrupt the domestic politics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Finland, Bosnia and Macedonia.

While those efforts were on behalf of politicians and parties that were seen as advancing the Kremlin’s interests, and weren’t strictly ideological, in most cases they resulted in support for far-right ethno-nationalists.

More recently, Russia appears to have assisted the Yes campaign leading up to the UK’s Brexit referendum and is alleged to have offered financial and other assistance to a whole string of far-right, anti-immigrant parties across Western Europe.

But just as this isn’t about the U.S. alone, it also isn’t about Russia. As The New York Times reported earlier this year, researchers have “discovered numerous copycats, particularly on the far right. Those groups often echo Kremlin talking points, making it difficult to discern the lines between Russian propaganda, far-right disinformation and genuine political debate.”

Last month, The Washington Post reported that, “as reporters, propaganda experts, and government officials ponder where the next plot to manipulate an election using social media will emerge, one country on the map appears to be blinking red: the Philippines.”

If that comes as a surprise, consider that Filipinos spend on average 10 hours a day online, that almost everyone older than 13 uses social media, and that Facebook is accessible on smartphones without paying data charges. The Philippines is a place where troll armies duke it out across the country and where an increasingly sophisticated web of public relations firms and social media contractors is emerging.

The disinformation industry in the country got a jump start when President Rodrigo Duterte employed a so-called keyboard army of paid trolls and supportive volunteers to help pave his way to an election victory in 2016.

In Brazil, another clownish demagogue whom nobody thought would win, Jair Bolsonaro, has given his countrymen tacit permission to torch the Amazon. He, too, can probably thank disinformation campaigns on social media for his unlikely victory.

As Zack Beauchamp wrote for Vox shortly after Brazil’s election:

At the inauguration of Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in early January, a crowd of his supporters began a surprising chant. They weren’t cheering for Bolsonaro or his running mate or their party; instead, they were reciting the names of social media platforms.

“Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!” the crowd yelled. “WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp!”

They were crediting the platforms with their man’s victory, and they aren’t entirely wrong. During the campaign, a conservative pro-business interest groupfunded a massive disinformation campaign on WhatsApp (the popular messaging app owned by Facebook). False and damaging information about Bolsonaro’s left-wing opponent, including fake news mocked up to look like neutral fact-checks, spread like wildfire in the runup to the October 8 vote. This deluge, according to one Brazilian expert, played a role in Bolsonaro’s victory.

The glee Bolsonaro’s supporters exhibited points to a troubling development, one familiar to many Americans: Social media, once seen as a profoundly democratic technology, is increasingly serving the needs of authoritarians and their allies.

The reality is that the true agendas of far-right “populists” tend to be quite unpopular. Around the world, they seem to have grasped that in order to claim and then hold onto power, they have to not only demonize their political opponents, but also discredit democratic institutions–especially the independent press–and their best tool for doing so is with coordinated disinformation campaigns disseminated largely through social media.

In this, they have a structural advantage over those who remain invested in pluralistic democracy. It is anathema to most of them to fight fire with fire–to stoop to using similar tactics–and as we know, a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can put on its boots.

Unless this asymmetry is addressed in some fashion–and it’s not an easy nut to crack–historians may look back at the early 21st century and conclude that this was the time when it became apparent that liberal democracy is fundamentally incompatible with the internet and it’s free-wheeling information infrastructure.

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...He isn’t interested in having us accept that there were airports in this country 130 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, nor that a man born over two hundred years ago is currently advocating for civil rights. He’s interested in having us give up on the idea that details, accuracy, and history are of any consequence at all. For without these to check against, to hold up as a mirror, no one — least of all he — is accountable.

“His words are so often at odds with the truth that they can appear ignorant,” Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, says of the president, “yet are in fact calculated to exacerbate religious, social and racial divisions.”

Trump’s words are indeed at odds with the truth. Just as often they are at odds with meaning. Are the incoherent tangles that come out of his mouth in lieu of sentences the best he can do? I used to think so, but I’ve come to agree with writer Lindy West that this too is purposeful, that “Trump has weaponized nonsense.” By turning language into something jumbled and befuddling, he’s commandeered the very tool we use to think

...

frank Walton 819 an

At its core, Donald Trump’s love is filtered through fascism and authoritarianism. His form of tainted love rests upon moral inversion, a state of being in which truth is replaced by lies, empirical reality itself is usurped, and the evil and immoral are transformed into the good and the noble. As Hannah Arendt warned in her landmark book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

In this malignant reality, people who are in thrall to Donald Trump (or the other ignominious fascist and authoritarian leaders whom he adores and imitates) do not know what right and wrong are anymore. When these distinctions are pointed out, Trump’s supporters double down on their investment in the Great Leader and “the Movement,” focusing their rage and violence against the political truth-teller.

Donald Trump’s love is exclusive rather than inclusive, narrow rather than broad. It is focused inward on the in-group as a way of legitimating violence and meanness towards the out-group. Trump’s love is not a celebration of the best of humanity but is itself inhumane.

They have become an authoritarian cult. Maybe they already were after the days of George W. Bush and decades of Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, Pirro, the rest of Faux Snooze, Sinclair, Newsmax, Breitbart and RT. They don’t flinch at his crazed, inhumane, and racist actions because they support his inhumane and racist actions. They like it. They think every little time the media has a bovine birth over his latest nutball action like trying to buy Greenland like it’s on sale at Walmart is great. He’s just trolling the media, and also “pwning the libs,”, ha ha! He called the prime minister of Denmark “nasty”? Just like Meghan Markle and Elizabeth Warren? Fine. He also said London’s Mayor Saddiq Khan was a “Nasty guy” and a “total loser” but since he’s a dude, that makes it fine.

Jake Tapper laughs in Pence’s face: ‘We don’t have the cleanest air and water in the world’

Aldous Pennyfarthing / Daily Kos

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/10-incredibly-fake-facts-trump-supporters-believe-are-true/

Americans, divided and polarized as they are, live in two distinct worlds. In one world, the earth is not flat, climate change is real and Bill and Hillary aren’t pimping kids out in the basement of a pizza restaurant.

The other world is devoid of reason, evidence and pretty much any type of historical facts. Despite the fact that Trump voters have been fleeced by the biggest con man in the world, they continue to devour the lies he sells on a silver platter. When it comes to facts, Trump supporters aren’t head over heels in love with them. After all, Trump’s rise came as a result of playing to uninformed and angry people’s primal and worst sensibilities. They’re right and the entire world is wrong, because that’s what their cult leader told them, and who needs Google anyway?

Here are 10 incredibly fake facts that Trump supporters believe are true.

1. Trump is a devoted Christian.

The thrice-married, pu$$y-grabbing Trump is actually quite the exemplary Christian, at least in the minds of his supporters. They are so convinced of this fake fact that they welcomed Trump at Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University this past weekend, where the president was given an honorary doctorate.

2. The economy is improving because of Trump.

If there’s anything Trump does better than filing for Chapter 11, it’s taking credit for things other people have done. Part-time First Lady Melania Trump stole a speech from Michelle Obama, so it only seems fitting that the Donald do it as well. Now, even though he hasn’t signed a single piece of economic legislation and all economic data is just a continuation of President Obama’s efforts, Trump seems to have no issue taking credit for all of the positive economic news. And despite the fact that Trump had been in office for a whopping two weeks, Fox News gave Trump full credit for a positive jobs report in January.

3. ‘Millions voted illegally’ (without a single shred of proof).

Not too long ago, a poll found that 55 percent of Trump supporters believe his daft conspiracy theory that the only reason he lost the popular vote is because “millions voted illegally” for Hillary Clinton. Ignorance is bliss, right?

4. Immigration is off the rails and illegal immigrants are all violentcriminals.

Trump played to the racist tendencies of working-class whites when he declared that Mexicans were criminals and rapists, except for some. He also took a page from Richard Nixon’s handbook and touted law and order for the silent majority. But here’s the thing for folks who reside in Realitytown, USA: net migration from Mexico is basically zero and stats show that undocumented immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. But facts are not how you Make America Great Again!

5. Trump should have the power to overturn judicial rulings.

Utterly clueless when it comes to the U.S. Constitution (except for the Second Amendment), 51 percent of Trump supporters think the Executive Branch should have the power to overrule the Judicial Branch. This came after Trump was overruled in his efforts to impose a Muslim travel ban.

6. Trumpcare is great while Obamacare is awful.

Okay, this one is especially heinous. During Trump’s presidential campaign, he talked constantly about how easy it would be to gut Obamacare and impose a version of his own that would cover everyone. Here are the facts:

Around 24 million people will lose their health insurance—many of them his most vocal supporters
Premiums, especially for Americans 50 and older, will increase dramatically.
States can opt-out of protecting people with pre-existing conditions.
Coverage will get worse.
Medicaid will be gutted.

Trumpcare is stealing from the poor to give to the rich, but his supporters don’t mind being screwed by their dear leader.

7. Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Ah yes, the birther question. The very thing that catapulted a washed-up reality TV host to political fame and fortune. Trump had been accusing President Obama of not being born in America for years, which seems to have resonated with his supporters: 59 percent of Trump supporters didn’t think Obama was born in the United States, while just a mere 23 percent said he was.

8. There’s a war on gun owners.

Despite the fact that gun ownership ballooned under President Obama and his sensible gun legislation failed miserably in the NRA-owned Republican Congress, Trump supporters believed there was a major “war” on guns. The biggest (and stupidest) conspiracy was the one involving Jade Helm, when right-wingers thought a military exercise was actually a secret ploy by Obama to declare martial law and seize all the guns.

9. All the investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia are bogus.

Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence that continues to pile up regarding Trump’s ties to Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, his supporters will hear nothing of it. They love Russia and think CNN and every other major news outlet is fake news that hates America. Bear in mind, all of this seems to be leading up to impeachment. But yeah, nothing to see here.

10. Trump is honest and trustworthy.

This may be the greatest fake fact of fake facts: Trump is honest and trustworthy. Despite the fact that nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is a brazen lie that can be disproved in a New York minute, his supporters think he’s honest. That’s just a special kind of ignorance you can’t fix. While some of his supporters have since seen the light of day, a majority of them still trust him despite all the explanations of his lies the media makes.

In short, it may just take Trump throwing puppies into a firepit for a majority of his supporters to recognize him for the lying con man that he is. Let’s certainly hope not, as that may not be out of the realm of possibility.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-do-we-pry-apart-the-true-and-compelling-from-the-false-and-toxic/

When false and malicious speech roils the body politic, when racism and violence surge, the right and role of freedom of speech in society comes into crisis. People rightly begin to wonder what are the limits, what should be the rules. It is a complicated issue, and resolving it requires care about the exact problems targeted and solutions proposed. Otherwise the risk to free speech is real.

Propaganda from Russian-funded troll farms (boosted by Facebook data breaches) might have contributed to the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union and aided the United States’ election of Donald Trump as president. Conspiracy theories spread by alternative news outlets or over social media sometimes lead to outbreaks of violence. Politicians exploit the mainstream news media’s commitment to balance, to covering newsworthy public statements and their need for viewers or readers by making baseless, sensational claims.

In On Liberty(1859), John Stuart Mill offers the most compelling defence of freedom of speech, conscience and autonomy ever written. Mill argues that the only reason to restrict speech is to prevent harm to others, such as with hate speech and incitement to violence. Otherwise, all speech must be protected. Even if we know a view is false, Mill says, it is wrong to suppress it. We avoid prejudice and dogmatism, and achieve understanding, through freely discussing and defending what we believe against contrary claims.

Today, a growing number of people see these views as naive. Mill’s arguments are better suited to those who still believe in the open marketplace of ideas, where free and rational debate is the best way to settle all disputes about truth and falsity. Who could possibly believe we live in such a world anymore? Instead, what we have is a Wild West of partisanship and manipulation, where social media gurus exploit research in behavioural psychology to compel users to affirm and echo absurd claims. We have a world where people live in cognitive bubbles of the like-minded and share one another’s biases and prejudices. According to this savvy view, our brave new world is too prone to propaganda and conspiracy-mongering to rely on Mill’s optimism about free speech. To do so is to risk abetting the rise of fascist and absolutist tendencies.

In his book How Fascism Works (2018), the American philosopher Jason Stanley cites the Russian television network RT, which presents all sorts of misleading and slanted views. If Mill is right, claims Stanley, then RT and such propaganda outfits ‘should be the paradigm of knowledge production’ because they force us to scrutinise their claims. But this is a reductio ad absurdum of Mill’s argument. Similarly, Alexis Papazoglou in The New Republic questions whether Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister turned Facebook’s new vice president of global affairs and communication, will be led astray by his appreciation of Mill’s On Liberty. ‘Mill seemed to believe that an open, free debate meant the truth would usually prevail, whereas under censorship, truth could end up being accidentally suppressed, along with falsehood,’ writes Papazoglou. ‘It’s a view that seems a bit archaic in the age of an online marketplace of memes and clickbait, where false stories tend to spread faster and wider than their true counterpoints.’

When important and false beliefs and theories gain traction in public conversation, Mill’s protection of speech can be frustrating. But there is nothing new about ‘fake news’, whether in Mill’s age of sensationalist newspapers or in our age of digital media. Nonetheless to seek a solution in restricting speech is foolish and counterproductive – it lends credibility to the illiberal forces you, paradoxically, seek to silence. It also betrays an elitism about engaging with those of different opinions and a cynicism about affording your fellow citizens the freedom to muddle through the morass on their own. If we want to live in a liberal democratic society, rational engagement is the only solution on offer. Rather than restricting speech, we should look to supplement Mill’s view with effective tools for dealing with bad actors and with beliefs that, although false, seem compelling to some.

Fake news and propaganda are certainly problems, as they were in Mill’s day, but the problems they raise are more serious than the falsity of their claims. After all, they are not unique in saying false things, as the latest newspaper corrections will tell you. More importantly, they involve bad actors: people and organisations who intentionally pass off false views as the truth, and hide their nature and motives. (Think Russian troll farms.) Anyone who knows that they are dealing with bad actors – people trying to mislead – ignores them, and justifiably so. It’s not worth your time to consider the claim of someone you know is trying to deceive you.

There is nothing in Mill that demands that we engage any and all false views. After all, there are too many out there and so people have to be selective. Transparency is key, helping people know with whom, or what, they are dealing. Transparency helps filter out noise and fosters accountability, so that bad actors – those who hide their identity for the purpose of misleading others – are eliminated.

Mill’s critics fail to see the truth that is mixed in with the false views that they wish to restrict, and that makes those views compelling. RT, for instance, has covered many issues, such as the US financial crisis, economic inequality and imperialism more accurately than mainstream news channels. RT also includes informed sources who are ignored by other outlets. The channel might be biased toward demeaning the US and fomenting division, but it often pursues this agenda by speaking truths that are not covered in mainstream US media. Informed news-watchers know to view RT and all news sources with skepticism, and there is no reason not to extend the same respect to the entire viewing public, unless you presume you are a better judge of what to believe than your fellow citizens.

Mill rightly thought that the typical case wasn’t one of views that are false, but views that have a mixture of true and false. It would be far more effective to try to engage with the truth in views we despise than to try to ban them for their alleged falsity. The Canadian psychologist and YouTube sensation Jordan Peterson, for example, says things that are false, misogynistic and illiberal, but one possible reason for his following is that he recognises and speaks to a deficit of meaning and values in many young men’s lives. Here, the right approach is to pry apart the true and compelling from the false and toxic, through reasoned consideration. This way, following Mill’s path, presents a better chance of winning over those who are lost to views we despise. It also helps us improve our own understanding, as Mill wisely suggests.

David V Johnson

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/conservative-jonah-goldbergs-fraudulent-claim-that-fascism-is-really-a-left-wing-phenomenon-will-not-die-more-than-a-decade-later/

Jonah Goldberg just keeps inspiring people—whether he intends to or not.

Take Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro,for example. Earlier this week, after visiting a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Bolsonaro was asked whether heagreed with comments made by his foreign minister claiming that the Nazis of Germany were “leftists.”

He did: “There is no doubt, right?” he said to reporters. He added that the appearance of theword “socialist”in the Nazis’ official party name proved it.

The museum he had just visited, however, isclear about the matter, telling visitors at its website that the German Nazi party arose out of “radical right-wing groups” in Europe.

Where would Bolsonaro get such ideas? He didn’t credit anyone, but the ultimate lineage of this idea really belongs to Goldberg. Perhaps, secondarily and more contemporarily, he’s been absorbing the derivative work of Dinesh d’Souza.

....

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-wind-turbines-cancer-2633591489.html

many lnx

Trump Falsely Claims Noise From Wind Turbines Causes Cancer

Olivia Rosane Apr. 03, 2019 12:08PM EST POPULAR

At a National Republican Congressional Committee event Tuesday night, President Donald Trump took his war on wind power to the next level.

"If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 per cent in value," Trump said, as The Independent reported. "And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay? Rerrrr rerrrr!"

Watch the clip below:

The cancer claim, as Jonathan Chait pointed out in New York Magazine, is not true. There has been opposition to wind turbines on the basis of long-standing beliefs that low-frequency sound can disturb sleep, trigger anxiety and cause nausea and other health problems, The Atlantic explained. but no scientific experiments have verified these claims.

"Cancer is not caused by noises of any kind," Chait wrote.

Social media was quick to counter Trump's remarks, The Huffington Post reported. Wired columnist Maryn McKenna took the opportunity to link to a study published in March that found no connection between wind turbine noise and heart attack or stroke. Researchers had conducted the study because of claims that wind turbine noise was more annoying than noise from traffic.

During his remarks Tuesday, Trump repeated claims he has made about wind turbines before, that they reduce property values and harm birds.

"And of course, it's like a graveyard for birds," he said Tuesday, as The Washington Post reported. "If you love birds, you'd never want to walk under a windmill."

Wind turbines do kill birds, but at a much lesser rate than other forms of power. A 2009 study cited by Chait found that fossil-fuel plants killed nearly 15 times the number of birds as wind turbines. So why does Trump hate wind turbines so much?

The Washington Post's Philip Bump wrote that it dated back to Trump's fight against a wind farm that had been scheduled to go up off the coast of Aberdeenshire in Scotland, where he had bought land to start a gulf course in 2006. Trump sued to stop the farm, but was not successful. He also initiated a public relations campaign against Scottish politicians backing the project and against wind power itself, tweeting any negative coverage he could find. As part of that blitz, he did retweet a story in 2012 claiming that wind power had negative health impacts, though no such impacts have been confirmed by scientists. Tuesday likely marks the first time he has claimed wind power causes cancer, Bump said.

Chait observed that Trump is selective in his health concerns when it comes to energy.

A power source that does cause many health problems, including cancer, is coal, an extremely dirty fuel Trump loves and has attempted to bolster, with almost no success. Aside from costing more to produce than other sources of power, and in addition to enormous air pollution side effects, coal also emits greenhouse gases in large amounts. Though this, of course, is another aspect of science Trump rejects.

Bump also noted that Trump's anti-wind stance dovetailed neatly with Republican policy.

"As climate change became a sharply polarized issue, Trump was prepared for the fight thanks to his battle over that wind farm near his golf course in Scotland," Bump wrote.

===

RU w S

State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind

March 19, 20191

FEATURING BRYANT WELCH - Millions of Americans have spent the last two years in a prolonged state of anxiety over the state of our nation. Donald Trump's Presidency has been

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/republicans-are-claiming-that-poverty-no-longer-exists-heres-why-thats-ridiculous/

chapman

For the longest time, one of the big talking points from Republicans was that government anti-poverty programs failed at their primary goal, merely trapping people in dependence on the government. “The federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won,” said President Ronald Reagan in an address to Congress. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) took it as fact, telling a constituent in 2017, “Our poverty rates are about the same as when we started this war on poverty.”

It’s a compelling talking point — it’s just completely wrong. In the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson enacted the broad package of programs referred to as the “war on poverty,” including Medicare, Medicaid, and federal housing programs, the poverty rate stood at 19 percent. In 2017, when Ryan had that exchange, the poverty rate stood at 13.5 percent, and it has never gone above 15.2 percent at any time since Johnson’s reforms. That might even be understating things a little, because the supplemental poverty rate — a more accurate calculation of poverty that accounts for transfer payments and the cost of living — has fallen from 26 percent to 14.3 percent during the 60s, meaning we’ve cut the poverty rate almost in half.

Now, however, Republicans in the Trump White House seem to be taking the exact opposite argument as Reagan and Ryan. In their reasoning, we should cut government assistance programs because poverty has already been solved!

“President Johnson’s War on Poverty, based on 1963 standards of material hardship, is largely over and has been a success,” said this year’s report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “However, victory was not achieved by making people self-sufficient, as President Johnson envisioned, but rather through increased government transfers.” The answer, says the report, is to scale back social programs by adding increasingly restrictive work requirements to weed out people who aren’t sufficiently deserving of federal and state aid.

First of all, the claim that poverty has been eliminated is itself incredibly dubious. The Council of Economic Advisers uses something called the Full-Income Poverty Measure, which measures consumption as well as income, to show that the “real” poverty rate has actually declined from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 2.3 percent in 2017. The problem with this measure is that an ever-increasing number of households finance consumption through debt, and most people who go into debt would not consider themselves out of poverty no matter how much they are consuming. Indeed, by the White House’s measure, poverty was lower during the financial crisis and recession of 2008 than they did during the 1990s tech boom, because people consumed more!

A recent economic study at the University of Michigan found that the “consumption poverty” rate does not correlate as well with the percent of households struggling to afford food, housing, or medical care, as the traditional poverty rate does.

Second of all, the Trump administration’s conclusion doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. If anti-poverty programs have all but eliminated poverty, why would scaling back these programs benefit anyone? It is similar to the logic that parents shouldn’t have to vaccinate their kids because we have eliminated childhood epidemics.

Moreover, study after study has shown that the sort of “work requirements” Trump’s advisers are pushing do not work — some programs have seen their enrollment decline slightly after adding work requirements, but the rules don’t make people more self-sufficient and barely affect employment or household income. Part of the reason is that many people on welfare already work, they just aren’t paid enough to feed their families.

The notion that poverty has already been solved, much like the notion that racism has already been solved, makes for a great justification to allow Republicans to attack the safety net. But it isn’t true, and telling poor people they aren’t really in poverty is not a substitute for addressing social problems.

alt fact post truth:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/john-bolton-threatens-iran-over-debunked-pursuit-of-nuclear-weapons/255032/

no lnx twit

As Iranians this week mark the 40th anniversary of their country’s 1979 revolution, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton declared in a message to Iranian leaders on Monday that he doesn’t think they will “have many more anniversaries to enjoy”—a comment that was immediately perceived as a direct threat of war.

In a video posted to the White House’s official Twitter page on Monday, Bolton echoed false assertions and repeatedly debunked claims by the Trump that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and described the Iranian government as the “central banker of international terrorism.”

Responding to Bolton’s video, Sen. Chris Murphy warned in a tweet on Tuesday that Trump’s hawkish national security adviser is knowingly lying to build momentum for a U.S. military attack on Iran....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/donald-trump-is-the-perfect-republican-a-party-built-on-lies-has-found-a-liar-to-lead-them/

wow, story/inventory

It’s hard to put your finger on the foundational lie of the modern Republican Party, there are so many contenders. But I would date it back to Ronald Reagan and the lie of supply side economics. Remember that whopper? Even George Bush the First called it “voodoo economics” before he embraced it. The idea that lowering taxes would raise revenue was as close to a perfect Republican lie as there ever was. It simultaneously lined the pockets of the wealthy, “starved the beast” of government (in the immortal words of Grover Norquist), and laid the groundwork to attack the so-called “entitlements” of Social Security and Medicare as the culprits when the deficit inevitably blew up. That the arguments for lowering taxes were spurious if not entirely fact free was just icing on the cake.

The only thing Republicans have learned from Donald Trump is that they no longer have to lie strategically. They don’t need a rationale behind a lie. Trump has taught them that all lies, all the time is the way to go. They didn’t even bother trying to defend the Trump/Ryan tax cuts of 2017 with lies about increased revenues and lowered deficits. They just sat back and threw money at their rich donors and let Trump sign the tax cuts into law, and then of course immediately went after Social Security and Medicare for blowing up the deficit.

Origin

The phrase was attributed by journalist Ron Suskind to an unnamed official in the George W. Bush Administration who used it to denigrate a critic of the administration's policies as someone who based their judgements on facts.^[2] In a 2004 article appearing in the New York Times Magazine, Suskind wrote:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.^[3] [SOME ^ARE ^BUILDING ^MONUMENTS, ^SOME ^ARE ^JOTTING ^DOWN ^NOTES]

^Suskind, ^Ron ⁽¹⁷ ^October ^2004). ^"Faith, ^Certainty ^and ^the ^Presidency ^of ^George ^W. ^Bush". ^The ^New ^York ^Times ^Magazine. ^ISSN ^0028-7822.

The source of the quotation was later identified as Bush's senior advisor Karl Rove,^[4] although Rove has denied saying it.^[5]

Evaluation

Though some on the left side of the United States political spectrum considered it as a badge of honor,^[2][6] the term and the piece of writing where it was revealed to the public were not perceived as significant by conservatives.^[7][8] It was given a second life by growth of the so-called post-truth political culture.^[9][10][11]

Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower considered the manner in which "the senior Bush aide derisively dismissed criticism from what he called "the reality based community" as demonstration of the "arrogance that swept the Bush White House".^[12] International Relations scholar Fred Halliday wrote that the phrase reality-based community (in contrast to faith-based community) was "a term of disparagement in the Bush Administration for those who did not share their international goals and aspirations".^[2] According to liberal media critic and journalism professor Jay Rosen, "Many on the left adopted the term. 'Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community,' their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left's self-description."^[13]

References

:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Poole, Steven (2007). *Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality*. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 9780802143051
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community#cite_ref-Halliday_2-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community#cite_ref-Halliday_2-2) Halliday, Fred (2010). *Shocked and Awed: How the War on Terror and Jihad Have Changed the English Language*. I.B.Tauris. p. 306. ISBN 978-0-85-771875-4.
:{Jump up:(style="background-color:initial;user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}::{^:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: Suskind, Ron (17 October 2004). "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush". The New York Times Magazine. ISSN 0028-7822.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Engelhardt, Tom (19 June 2014). "Karl Rove Unintentionally Predicted the Current Chaos in Iraq". Mother Jones.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Schonfeld, Zach (8 September 2017). "The Curious Case of a Supposed Karl Rove Quote Used on The National's New Album 'Sleep Well Beast:{':(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". Newsweek.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Zelizer, Julian E. (2010). *The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment*. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691149011
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Limbaugh, David (2007). *Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party*. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, p. 337. ISBN 9781596980174
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Bruce Bartlett (November 26, 2012). Revenge of the Reality-Based Community: My life on the Republican right—and how I saw it all go wrong, The American Conservative.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Damon Linker (January 27, 2016). The left vs. the reality-based community, TheWeek.com.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Andersen, Kurt (September 2017). How America Lost Its Mind: The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history, The Atlantic.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Pennycook, Alastair (2017). *Posthumanist Applied Linguistics*. New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 9781138209244
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Brzezinski, Zbigniew (2008). *Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower*. New York: Basic Books, p. 137. ISBN 0465002528
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Rosen, Jay (20 December 2006). "The Retreat from Empiricism and Ron Suskind's Intellectual Scoop". The Huffington Post.

External links

"The Reality Based Community", a blog by Mark Kleiman

rare fox sanity:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fox-news-viewers-melt-down-after-shep-smith-blows-latest-hillary-conspiracy-theory

uranium one

The president of Trinity Washington University harshly criticized President Trump's aide Kellyanne Conway, who graduated from the university in 1989.

Patricia McGuire accused Conway of "facilitating the manipulation of facts" and encouraging "grave injustice" by supporting Trump's policies, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

“Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway, Trinity Class of 1989, has played a large role in facilitating the manipulation of facts and encouraging the grave injustice being perpetrated by the Trump Administration’s war on immigrants among many other issues,” McGuire wrote, according to the newspaper.

Kellyanne Conway Invents Terrorist Attack to Justify Muslim Ban

HEADLINESFEB 03, 2017

H02 kellyanne

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway is facing widespread criticism after she attempted to justify President Trump’s executive order banning people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. by inventing a terrorist attack that never happened. This is Conway speaking to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

Kellyanne Conway: "I bet it’s brand-new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. Most people don’t know that, because it didn’t get covered."

The Washington Post reports there was no terrorist attack carried out in Bowling Green, Kentucky, by Iraqis or anyone else. There were two Iraqi men living in Bowling Green who were arrested in 2011 on charges of having attempted to send money and weapons to al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Washington Post also reports the Obama administration never imposed a ban on Iraqi resettlement, contrary to Conway’s claims. The Obama administration did implement a more extensive screening procedure for Iraqi refugees after the 2011 arrests.

White House Falsely Claims Iran Attacked U.S. Ship

HEADLINESFEB 03, 2017

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer falsely claimed Thursday that Iran attacked a U.S. naval vessel—which, if it were true, would constitute an act of war. In fact, Spicer was referring to a Houthi rebel attack against a Saudi ship off the coast of Yemen on Monday. This is Sean Spicer.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer: "I think General Flynn was really clear yesterday that Iran has violated the joint resolution, that Iran’s additional hostile actions that it took against our Navy vessel are ones that we are very clear are not going to sit by and take."

This false claim comes after National Security Adviser Michael Flynn condemned Iran’s recent ballistic missile test launch and said the U.S. was putting Iran "on notice." This morning, President Trump tweeted, "Iran is playing with fire–they don’t appreciate how 'kind' President Obama was to them. Not me!" Many experts, as well as Iran’s Foreign Ministry, say the missile test does not violate the terms of a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution. The test also does not violate the terms of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal between Iran, the U.S. and other nations. The White House is expected to impose additional sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities over the missile test.

neut dispute wiki]

"Alternative facts" is a phrase used by Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017,^[1][2][3][4] in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance at Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer "utter[ed] a provable falsehood", Conway said "Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood, and ... our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that."^[5][6] Todd responded by saying "Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods."

Conway's use of the phrase "alternative facts" to describe what are widely regarded as falsehoods was mocked on social media and sharply criticized by Dan Rather, Jill Abramson, and the Public Relations Society of America. The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian; by Thursday, January 26, 2017, sales of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased by 9,500 percent, becoming the number one best seller on Amazon.com.^[7][8]

[hide]

Background

On January 21, 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held his first press briefing. He accused the media of deliberately underestimating the size of the crowd for President Trump's inaugural ceremony and stated that the ceremony had drawn the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe."^[9] According to all available data, Spicer's allegations were false.^[10][11][12] Aerial images showed that the turnout for Trump's inauguration was lower than the turnout for the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Spicer claimed that 420,000 people rode the DC Metro on inauguration day 2017, compared to 317,000 in 2013. It is "unclear where his 420,000 figure... comes from" or what time periods he was comparing. Actual ridership figures between midnight and 11 AM were 193,000 in 2017, 317,000 in 2013.^[13][14] Full-day ridership was 570,557 in 2017, 782,000 in 2013.^[15]

During the week following Conway's comments, she discussed "alternative facts", substituting the phrases "alternative information" and "incomplete information".^[18] Two days after the Todd interview she defended Trump's travel restrictions by referring to a nonexistent "Bowling Green Massacre" and by falsely claiming that President Obama in 2011 had "banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months". Her misstatements were described as having "taken 'alternative facts' to a new level".^[19]Spicer also gave incorrect information about the use of white ground coverings during the inauguration. He stated that they were used for the first time during the Trump inauguration and were to blame for a visual effect that made the audience look smaller. The white ground coverings, however, had been used in 2013 when Obama was sworn in for the second term.^[16] Spicer took no questions from the media at the press briefing.^[9] Trump's campaign strategist and counselor, Kellyanne Conway, defended Spicer's statements, telling NBC's Chuck Todd that the press secretary, simply, was giving "alternative facts", and that Trump's crowd numbers could not be proved nor quantified.^[4][17]

The phrase "alternative facts" was noted for its similarity to a phrase used in Trump's 1987 book, Trump: The Art of the Deal.^[20][21][22] In that book, "truthful hyperbole" was described as "an innocent form of exaggeration—and... a very effective form of promotion." The book claimed that "people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular." The ghostwriter of the book, Tony Schwartz, said he coined that phrase and claimed that Trump "loved it".^[23][24]

Reaction

Spicer's press conference and Conway's follow-up comments drew quick reactions on social media. Journalist Dan Rather posted a scathing criticism of the incoming U.S. Presidential administration on his Facebook page.^[25][26] Rather wrote:

These are not normal times. These are extraordinary times. And extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

When you have a spokesperson for the president of the United States wrap up a lie in the Orwellian phrase "alternative facts"...

When you have a press secretary in his first appearance before the White House reporters threaten, bully, lie, and then walk out of the briefing room without the cojones to answer a single question...^[27]

he concluded,

Facts and the truth are not partisan. They are the bedrock of our democracy. And you are either with them, with us, with our Constitution, our history, and the future of our nation, or you are against it. Everyone must answer that question.^[27]

The New York Times responded with a fact check of statements made during Spicer's press conference.^[28] This included a side by side photographic comparison of the crowds from Obama's 2009 inauguration and that of Trump.

According to The Guardian, Breitbart News defended Conway's use of "alternative facts" by arguing that it is "a harmless, and accurate, term in a legal setting, where each side of a dispute will lay out its own version of the facts for the court to decide," but noted themselves that "[a] search of several online legal dictionaries, however, did not yield any results for the term."^[29]

Journalist and former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson characterized Conway's comments about alternative facts as "Orwellian newspeak", and said "'Alternative facts' are just lies".^[30]

The Merriam-Webster dictionary website reported that lookups for the word "fact" spiked after Conway used the phrase "alternative facts".^[31] They also got involved by tweeting about it: "A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality." The tweet included a link to their article^[31] about Conway's use of the term.^[32][33][34]

Following Conway's Meet the Press interview and the viral response on social media in which "alternative facts" was compared to newspeak, a term from George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, sales of the book increased by more than 9,500 percent,^[8] rising to the number one best-selling book on Amazon.com. Media outlets ascribed the renewed interest in the novel to Conway's remarks.^{[8][35][36][37][38]} Penguin, the book's publisher, ordered a 75,000 unit reprint to meet demand.^{[39][40][37][38][41]}

On January 24, 2017, the Public Relations Society of America, a public relations trade group, put out a statement that said "Encouraging and perpetuating the use of alternative facts by a high-profile spokesperson reflects poorly on all communications professionals."^[42][43] Robert Stoker from George Washington University cautioned that the term "alternative facts" can and should be distinguished from falsehoods.^[44]

Correction by Spicer

On January 23, Spicer corrected his statements concerning the WMATA ridership levels, stating that he had been relying on statistics "given to him". He stood by his widely-disputed claim that the inauguration was the most-viewed, stating he also included online viewership in addition to in-person and television in his figures.^[45][46]

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State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind

Origin

Evaluation

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Contents

Background

Reaction

Correction by Spicer

References

post-truth 2

The Reality Game

Trump called out for ‘Orwellian lie’ after saying he ‘saved pre-existing conditions’ — while trying to kill ObamaCareDavid Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement120 an

==

Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era Reprint Edition

===

Origin

Evaluation

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Contents

Background

Reaction

Correction by Spicer

References

Trump called out for ‘Orwellian lie’ after saying he ‘saved pre-existing conditions’ — while trying to kill ObamaCare David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement120 an